Just months after addressing a racist online video, officials in a Texas school district are scrambling to get a handle on blow back from a second offensive video involving several local high school students.
The Carroll Independent School District on Wednesday said it was alerted to an “inappropriate video with racial slurs shared by students on social media” and that it was already working to discipline the students involved. The latest video comes after district officials punished a group of students in October for posting video of themselves chanting the n-word, station FOX 4 reported.
Carroll ISD officials said not all the students in the video are Carroll/Southlake teens. (Photo courtesy of Fox 4)
“Because of the disruption to the educational environment, our campus administrators have already taken steps to consistently apply the Student Code of Conduct to the extent allowable under the law,” Carroll ISD said in a statement posted to Facebook. “We are acting swiftly and consistently; behavior that involves derogatory speech that targets individuals or groups of individuals for their ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation or disabilities will not be tolerated in Carroll ISD.”
“This type of speech will always be unacceptable and quite frankly, makes us angry and sad,” it continued.
The video in question shows four teens in a car jamming to music when at least two of them suddenly start shouting the n-word. District officials said at least two of the teens attend school in the Southlake/Carroll district. One is from the 9th-10th grade Southlake Carroll High School campus while the other is an upperclassman.
“We are sad, we are angry this has happened again,” spokeswoman Julie Thannum told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “We don’t tolerate this behavior. We may not be able to make it go away completely, but we are taking a strong stance.”
A Southlake Carroll High School alum who spoke on the condition on anonymity said he wasn’t surprised when learned of the racist video, seeing as the community had already been rocked by a separate video controversy. He said racial tensions have been festering for years and that many of the students grow up without seeing much diversity.
During his time attending Southlake Carroll schools, the former student recalled only having one African-American teacher over his 13 years of K-12 education.
“There are social consequences growing up in a social space of people who look just like you,” he told the newspaper.
Carroll ISD said it immediately launched an investigation into the 12-second clip after students made them aware of it Tuesday night. Officials said the teen girl prominently featured in the video has written an apology but will still face disciplinary action.
District officials began working with police, School Resource Officers and parents after the first video in October, the Star-Telegram reported, and updated its policies for dealing with discrimination. The District and Campus Diversity Councils also brought students together for discussions on racial awareness and sensitivity.
In a Facebook post, Southlake Mayor Laura Hill urged parents to wake up and take some responsibility for their children’s behavior, arguing that the district should’t be expected to raise their bratty kids.
“Every time a child does something ignorant or just plain bad we demand to know what the district is going to do and what will the punishment be,” Hill said. “As a parent, we constantly demand the district fix problems when we obviously haven’t been able to fix them ourselves. This ugly thinking can’t be ‘fixed’ by some magical punishment from Carroll ISD.”
Watch more in the video below.
