Sometimes Black History Month can be the cruelest month.
During the same week in February 2022, at two different Santa Barbara Unified School District junior high schools, two 12-year-old Black boys were victims in painful episodes of racist bullying.
SBUSD is being sued by the victims’ mothers, who accuse school officials of not doing more to protect their kids in a city where African Americans have long been an extreme minority.
This is a story studded with cruel ironies.
Less than two years later, a Black Santa Barbara Junior High student was assaulted by Latino classmates mimicking the lethal police attack on George Floyd, their knees pressed against the victim’s neck. Within days, a Black La Colina Junior High student was bullied by a white student who made a TikTok video comparing photos of him and other Black students to monkeys and apes. The video, accompanied by an offensive song, was festooned with the N-word.
In their initial court filing, mothers Leeandra Shalhoob and Katherine McCullough argued the attacks were the culmination of a pattern of racist bullying throughout their sons’ years in Santa Barbara public schools. Shalhoob said that despite the district’s proclamations, school officials allegedly acknowledged, “We don’t know how to deal with this.”
Blacks make up less than 1% of SBUSD’s student body, which is majority Latino (61%) followed by white students (31%). Asian American and Pacific Islander, Native American and students of two or more races account for the remainder.
Shalhoob and McCullough initially filed suit against the district in August 2022 seeking reform of SBUSD’s practices and compensation for the toll on their sons. Mediation efforts collapsed in December 2022. In February of this year, they filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against SBUSD. The filing requested unspecified damages and a jury trial. The case is still pending.
The mothers allege that despite the schools’ awareness of racist bullying, teachers and administrators failed to intervene, protect their children, adequately inform the parents or provide prompt and effective support for their sons.
“It’s difficult to put a dollar amount on wanting someone to do something right,” said Shalhoob. “I had to learn that often change comes from someone feeling like they had to pay for what they did wrong.”
She continued, “But more than anything, I just don’t want anyone at Santa Barbara Unified School District ever again to be able to say, ‘I didn’t know what to do.’”
Not long after the attacks, McCullough said that Gateway Educational Services, a Black women-led nonprofit learning center, and Healing Justice Santa Barbara, a Black women-led nonprofit, organized parents and children that spring to speak out at school board meetings about unchecked anti-Black racism in the SBUSD.