‘Was So Overwhelmed with All the Comments’:  Black Vermont Student Who Was Bombarded with Racist Bullying, Compared to a ‘Chimpanzee’ and ‘Runaway Slave’ Wins $175K Settlement

The family of a Black Rwandan American student who faced racial slurs and persistent racial harassment at his Woodstock, Vermont middle school won a $175,000 settlement to resolve his case against the school district, which failed to intervene on his behalf, according to the investigation report of the Vermont Human Rights Commission.

It’s the largest individual settlement for a school-based racial discrimination claim in the history of the commission, according to its executive director, Big Hartman.

The student, “P.H.,” who came to Vermont from Rwanda when he was adopted as an infant, was 13 years old in 2021 when he began facing harassment from students at predominantly white Woodstock Union Middle and High School, reported the VTDigger.

P.H., who now attends a private high school, has taken up golfing and is active in the Model U.N. program. (Credit: Jaya Holliman)

According to the complaint filed with the commission on the boy’s behalf by his adoptive mother, Jaya Holliman, in 2022, his seventh-grade classmates regularly called him the N-word and taunted him with “unwelcome” comments and memes about liking fried chicken, his ancestors picking cotton, and comparing his foot speed to runaway slaves. 

During a science class discussion about human evolution, a student compared his head to a chimpanzee’s skull. On another occasion, a student asked him if “Planet of the Apes” was his favorite movie.

One male student, “D,” waved a banana at P.H. during lunch and told him he “looked like he could use” it.  The same student also used a black marker to mark on P.H.’s arm and then commented that he could not see where he had marked, followed by a gun gesture toward the boy’s head. The teacher sent D out of the classroom for the last 20 minutes of class, the report notes. He was later given a week of lunch detention.

The school’s principal, Garon Smail, allegedly conducted investigations into three of the incidents involving racial slurs and harassment of the student and substantiated his complaints, finding the offending students’ behavior had violated the school district’s Hazing, Harassment, and Bullying (HHB) policy.

Smail found that “student use of harassing language may have occurred” and expressed his concerns that “a hostile, intimidating or offensive environment may at times be present” at the school. 

He told Holliman that the students who engaged in harassing her son might be subject to discipline, but did not provide any details on any other remedial or preventative actions the school would take, if any.

For the next several months, the boy was subjected to more racial harassment on a nearly daily basis, the complaint says, some of which staff and faculty at the school observed. 

In response to more than six incidents involving racial harassment and bullying pertaining to her son’s race, skin color and national origin, Holliman repeatedly contacted Smail and Sherry Sousa, the superintendent of the school district, Mountain Views Supervisory Union

P.H. and Jaya Holliman (Credit: Jaya Holliman)

In dozens of emails referenced in the complaint, she asked to meet with the principal, to be provided copies of the HHB investigative reports, and sought to set up a safety plan for her son, who she said felt unsafe and uncomfortable in his classes.

In violation of district policy and state law, which says administrators must investigate and report on claims of racial harassment within 5 days, the principal, in some cases, took weeks to look into the boy’s complaints or to communicate with Holliman about them. Some incidents were not investigated at all, she claims.

After more than a week passed after she had asked the principal to set up the safety plan, on March 30, 2022, Holliman pulled her son out of school for five days and asked for schoolwork to be sent home for him. Instead, what she got was notices about his unexcused absences.

By mid-April the safety plan was finally implemented. It said teachers would provide academic support to P.H. if he missed classes due to harassment or needed to work at home or in other safe, quiet spaces for independent work. He would not be in classes, lunch or clubs with students found to have engaged in harassment, who would be in a separate location, and instructed not to speak with or communicate digitally with him.

Adults would also monitor the hallways before school and between classes. The plan also included an offer for P.H. to receive mental health services in response to the harassment he was experiencing. The plan would be reviewed weekly.

But on May 3, a student in his science class made the comment equating his skull to a chimpanzee’s and sent other students, including P.H., a video wherein he used the N-word. Students who had harassed him before during lunch were present and continued to do so.

P.H. ended up sitting alone in the library for the next six weeks, missing his social studies and science classes, feeling isolated, stressed and traumatized, the complaint says. 

“I was so overwhelmed with all the comments and … constant day-to-day harassment that I didn’t know how to feel,” the student later told the commission’s investigator. “I had to shut down.”

P.H. was provided with lesson plans and access to Google Docs, but not instruction, according to the complaint. He told Atlanta Black Star that none of his teachers ever came to check on him. Holliman’s multiple requests for a new safety plan that would allow her son to participate in his classes went ignored, she says.

Smail emailed Holliman that he found the skull comment “ignorant and offensive” and said that while he had “addressed” the comments with the offending student, he believed that students would make more ignorant and offensive comments based on race and that he planned to meet soon with a consultant “to discuss ways to approach these challenges safely and respectfully.”

On May 19, Smail allegedly acknowledged that P.H. missing classes was not good but characterized the previous student comments about chimpanzee skulls and use of the N-word as “microaggressions.” He added that P.H. needed to be “prepared for” more of the same.

“It was [Smail’s] belief that the statements did not create an unsafe learning environment,” the complaint says.

The Vermont Human Rights Commission, which conducted an investigation into the family’s complaints, concluded in its January 2024 investigative report that it found “reasonable grounds to believe” that the school and supervisory union discriminated against the student based on race, color or national origin, in violation of state law, the Vermont Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act.

The report said the student had faced unwelcome racial harassment that was so severe or pervasive that it negatively impacted his equal access to learning opportunities and that P.H. and his family had exhausted their administrative remedies.

The report noted that the school had made some efforts to address the racial harassment along the way. 

In response to one of the N-word incidents early in the academic year, Superintendent Sousa wrote to Holliman that she appreciated her willingness to “engage with us … exposing for us our white misconceptions, and asking us the hard questions that will allow us to become anti-racist educators and leaders.”

The three students who had made race-based comments or sent race-based memes to P.H. participated in a “restorative circle” at school with three adults, including several rounds of questioning “to help students reflect on their choices and the impact of their behaviors,” according to the investigation report.

A safety plan was long delayed, then finally acted on. However, the victimized student told the commission investigator that a week after the safety plan was implemented, it was no longer enforced, and the offending students were no longer being kept separate from him during lunch and continued to harass him.

And the N-word bombs and other racial slurs kept coming in hallways and in classes through the end of the school year.

The commission’s investigator concluded that the school district failed “to take prompt and appropriate disciplinary and/or remedial action reasonably calculated to stop the harassment and prevent any recurrence of harassment.”

The supervisory union denied any wrongdoing or liability in the settlement agreement.

Superintendent Sousa told VTDigger in an email last month that she disagreed with the commission’s findings and that she “decided to settle the dispute to avoid the time and expense of litigation.”

“Although we settled the complaint, I stand behind my staff and administrators who worked tirelessly to meet this student’s needs, and who responded immediately and appropriately to any complaints of harassment reported to the school by the student or their parents,” she wrote. 

In addition to the financial settlement, resolved in May of 2024, the commission and supervisor union agreed on a series of training sessions for school staff over the next three years aimed at preventing future incidents of hazing, harassment and bullying within the school system.

Hartman, the commission director and general counsel, told Atlanta Black Star that they conducted an initial 3-hour training session with more than 200 supervisory union faculty and staff last fall, including “implicit bias training, role-playing… and how to intervene in the moment, as well as how to go ahead and report things and follow up.”

“We could see there were gaps in what they knew,” they said, “and that’s why we do these trainings. They were very engaged and there was a lot of enthusiasm around coming back and doing more small group sessions and giving folks more chance to discuss the issues that they’re encountering day to day.”

Hartman said they will be creating tailored training plans for each of the six schools in the district.

Since the 2024 settlement agreement came to light in the media this week, the commission has received a flurry of new inquiries about harassment in schools.

“It’s spurring some families to take action about what they’re going through,” said Hartman, noting that Vermont has seen an escalation of race-based school harassment allegations involving physical assaults coupled with racial slurs over the past year. “We hope that a settlement of this magnitude sent a message to schools and administrators that they really need to proactively prevent student harassment and follow all the mandates of the harassment laws.”

On Monday, the Rutland Area NAACP said in a statement that the settlement between Woodstock Union High School and Middle School and the Human Rights Commission “highlights the persistent failure of schools to address racial harassment, underscoring the urgent need for meaningful reform.”

The NAACP chapter wants ongoing anti-racism education for teachers and administrators in the school district, more reporting and accountability measures to protect students of color, and statewide equity reforms with more robust policies to protect minority students in every district.

“It should not take lawsuits to compel schools to fulfill their duty of care,” said chapter president Mia Schultz. “Every educator, administrator, and policymaker has a responsibility to foster an environment where all students can thrive.”

She expressed disappointment that the school district, whose officials “failed to investigate, intervene, or provide adequate safety measures … has denied any liability.” 

P.H., who is now 16 and attending a private high school where he feels racial comments and bullying are better dealt with by staff, had this to say in the NAACP statement:

“The adversity I faced at Woodstock should never have been placed in front of me. I didn’t see anyone in the Woodstock school system fight for me, so I fought for myself. With the help of family and friends, we demanded justice. There is a sentiment I created while fighting through the dark period of my life in seventh grade: ‘If you don’t like the reality you’re living in, create yourself a new one.’”

Now a tenth grader, P.H. plays football and golf, takes art history and government as electives, and participates in leadership development activities such as the Model United Nations. He told VTDigger he’s interested in studying politics and communications in college.

Students completing a project at Woodstock Union Middle and High School. (Photo: Woodstock Union Middle and High School)

Next week, he’ll be going to a Model U.N. event in Boston acting as the delegate to South Africa, and is preparing to make a speech about nuclear disarmament. After that, he’ll travel to D.C. for a program promoting youth immersion in government.

But he said his trust in the community is broken, in part because the teachers who saw or heard about what happened to him chose not to get involved.

“Obviously, you can’t have a community where harsh things aren’t said,” he told Atlanta Black Star. “You can’t control everything that comes out of a student’s mouth. But having an adequate response, dealing with things swiftly and effectively, that’s really the biggest thing they’re supposed to do … and what I still struggle to understand and come to peace with. … They just willingly didn’t step up to the challenge and didn’t live up to their duties as a teacher.”

His mother, meanwhile, has joined those advocating for the state to change the language in its Title 16 law defining the standards for proving harassment claims in public schools in a court of law. The law currently requires harassment to be “so severe and pervasive” that it substantially affects a targeted student’s equal access to educational opportunities or benefits.

“I’m really tired … from 14 years of watching racism destruct individuals and destruct confidence and destruct happiness and destruct joy and destruct families and relationships, opportunities and education,” she told legislators at a Vermont House committee meeting in 2023.

Holliman said her son, “whose name when translated means ‘peace and love’ … has been a brilliant, capable, curious, kind, indulgently dedicated, focused, witty and deeply feeling child until he was racially harassed, again and again.”

Two years later, he was more apt to be silent and withdrawn, and those qualities she listed “are so covered up,” she said. “He is struggling” due to the harassment he faced in school. “Hopefully, he’ll learn new ways, he’ll heal, he’ll compensate, but there’s good data on the legacy of trauma … it doesn’t go away and impacts every relationship in the family.”

Holliman, who is white, adopted her son in Rwanda in 2008, about a year after losing another son during childbirth, according to the Rutland Herald. She was initially reluctant to adopt a child from another country because “she worried it wouldn’t be fair to wrest a child from its own culture to bring it to a predominantly Caucasian state like Vermont.”

But as she read about the genocide that killed as many as 1 million people in Rwanda in 1994 and the bleak prospects of orphans in the Central African nation, where 60 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, “I realized that orphans there have little hope for a future so I started changing my tune,” she said.

Now, she told the lawmakers, she’s having to heavily advocate for her son to enjoy the rights and benefits due to all American students. She said parents should not bear the burden of reporting racial harassment and pushing administrators to recognize what’s happening and to act to protect their children. As it is, she said, the school system “has no levers of accountability” to help students and concerned parents stop racism and harassment, which is “rampant.”

“It can’t be that a child goes to school every day and tries to be in English class and science class and is dealing with gross, latent racial harassment.  … There are kids not reporting that they’re called the N-word so many times in one day … because they have reported it and nothing happens. These kids just have to take it and take it.”

While he’s doing well academically and having more fun in school these days, P.H. told Atlanta Black Star that he’s still guarded in his relationships with both adults and his peers.

“I don’t think being in a social setting I can ever recover to the full amount of opening my heart and fully trusting new people to just be decent,” he said. “But I think within myself I found more strength and intention … and I just appreciate all the opportunities I’m blessed with, my family, and all the things that God has given me to have a great life.”

He said he’s proud of himself for working with his legal team to negotiate a settlement with the school district that started with a $1,000 offer and ended up at $175,000. It might have been more if he and his mother hadn’t insisted on not signing a non-disclosure agreement. It was important to them to be able to talk publicly about their experience, he said.

P.H. remains disappointed that no one at the school or the district has ever extended “a simple apology,” he said. “I had hoped the adults who made so little conscious effort to protect me at a very young age should be able five years later come up with a way to say ‘I’m sorry.’ But there just isn’t any accountability.”

The family’s lawyer, civil rights and employment law attorney Zachary Hozid, told Atlanta Black Star that news of the large settlement has “emboldened more families to come forward with complaints.” He is currently handling several cases involving racial discrimination claims by students against Vermont public schools.

The common theme in all of the cases, he said, “is pretty hostile and aggressive behavior from other students and the schools’ repeated lack of response. These cases all have not just one instance of harassment, but it’s ongoing for months. In other cases I’ve been involved with, it’s months, sometimes years, of harassment that the school is aware of and either just missing it or diminishing the value of it.”

In the case of P.H., he said, “They should have done something more, and the remedy is that the Black kid being harassed has to sit alone out of the classroom — that’s not the appropriate remedy. I’m not necessarily advocating for keeping perpetrators out of the classroom. I think the goal is to try to integrate everybody into the class. But if the student can’t behave and is disruptive to other students, then you have to find some alternative. The student who is being harassed shouldn’t be the one to be excluded, that’s just adding insult to injury.”

To the extent that some of the “perpetrator students claimed they were just trying to be humorous and not necessarily offensive, they should be educated about why what they’re saying and doing is offensive,” said Hozid. “And if it is intended to be offensive, there should be something more harshly done about it. Families don’t necessarily know what should be done, but they certainly know when things aren’t being done, and it’s really incumbent on schools to provide some sort of response to these behaviors and or consult with someone who knows how to deal with racism or whatever the harassment is.”

The Mountain Views Supervisory Union did not respond to a request for comment.

Note: This story has been updated to include additional comments by and photos of “P.H.” and Jaya Holliman.

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