Two Black individuals allege that their former high school in rural New Jersey was rife with an “extreme, egregious, widespread” racist culture that forced one of them to withdraw just to escape the hostility and discrimination.
According to the New Jersey Herald, two former students who attended North Warren Regional High School filed a lawsuit in the New Jersey District Court against the school, its board of education, and four of the district’s employees.
They allege that they experienced a culture of racism for years that was so “ingrained” in the North Warren Regional School District that they were subjected to bigotry, taunting, and bullying that was “permitted to take root and flourish.”
Both plaintiffs, a Black woman and a man who were enrolled in the school in 2016 and 2018, respectively, stated that other students made it a habit to call them the N-word and other slurs frequently, which went unchecked by school administrators.
In one instance recounted in the suit, the Black female student stated that in 2016, a white male student grabbed her backpack strings in the hallway in front of other students and said, “Look, I have a slave on a leash.”
Not only did the incident “scar” her, but when she reported it to the school’s anti-bullying coordinator, Tina Richie, the coordinator allegedly assigned her the task of creating a curriculum to educate incoming students.
Her claim says after she joined the school’s cross-country team, her teammates regularly called her racial slurs and refused to stop after she confronted them. Her hair was also the subject of attention and unwarranted bullying. According to the suit, several students mocked her hair for being different from theirs, and a teacher once asked her if it was a wig in front of her classmates.
The Black male student alleged a white male student called him a “slave” while he was changing in the boys’ gym locker room in October 2018 and whipped him with a belt on the back of the leg, which left him with a cut, according to the complaint.
That same year, some students approached him and showed him a poster, asking him to join the “KKK,” which they called the “Kool Kids Klub,” he alleges.
During his time on the school’s wrestling team, his teammates would repeatedly call him slurs, even in front of the coach and other faculty members. Some students even formed a Snapchat group in 2021 where they discussed what slurs to call him.
“The horrible reality was that many students at the school called [the male Black student] the [“N-word”] regularly and did so with casual ease passing in the hallway, in the lunchroom, on the bus, in the classroom, and at athletic events,” the complaint states.
The suit also outlines other heinous incidents he suffered on the team. During one of his matches, another wrestler compared him to George Floyd. At another wrestling meet, his teammates knelt on the floor, made a Black power sign with a fist to mimic former football player Colin Kaepernick, then changed hand signals and made a Nazi salute, which brought them “amusement,” the suit states.
In another incident that was also the “subject of amusement,” the Black student’s teammates tackled him to the ground while holding up a Nazi salute, and one of them “pretended to rape” him. The suit states this incident was recorded on someone’s cellphone.
The student’s mother spoke with the team’s wrestling coach, Kellen Bradley, multiple times to get him to address the harassment and assaults, but to no avail. According to the complaint, Bradley only “generally” responded to her complaints and took no actionable steps to stop the harassment and penalize the bullies.
The malice and bigotry the Black students suffered caused them both great anxiety and mental distress, according to the suit. The Black female student sought to withdraw from the high school in 2020 but stayed after the COVID-19 crisis shifted classes online. She graduated in 2022.
The Black male student quit the wrestling team on Feb. 14, 2022, and withdrew from the school on Feb. 28, 2022, weeks after his mother filed an official HIB (Harassment, Intimidation, Bullying) complaint.
The district’s then-superintendent, Sarah Bilotti, later notified the student’s mother that six students were suspended after the district found they violated the school’s HIB rules. The parent then met with multiple administrators, requesting they institute a plan and a timeline to stop race-based bullying at the school, but the school’s then-principal, Jeanene Dutt, told her, “No,” the complaint states.
Dutt is now the superintendent of the North Warren Regional School District.
In response to the suit’s filing, she released a statement saying, “[O]ut of respect for the confidentiality rights of the students, we are not at liberty to comment in the press beyond stating that we respectfully disagree with the claims and look forward to defending against them in court.”
The suit named Dutt, Tina Richie, Sarah Bilotti, and Bradley as defendants. It alleges they knew the school was overrun with racist conduct that “exceeded all possible bounds of human decency” but took no action to deter it.
The plaintiffs are demanding unspecified damages after suffering severe emotional distress and physical and psychological injuries, the suit states.
The North Warren Regional School District is located in Blairstown, New Jersey, more than 50 miles west of Newark, and serves students in grades seven to 12. It served 879 students in the 2016-2017 school year.
The Herald reports that the Black female student was one of five Black students in her grade and one of 18 Black kids in the school when she was enrolled in the district in 2017. When the Black male student enrolled in 2018, he was one of only two Black kids in his grade and one of 19 in the school.
