Students at a Texas middle school called a black female student an ape, hurled racial insults at her, and pretended to whip her, according to a school report.
Robert Ranco, a civil rights lawyer, claimed that Tippet Middle School failed to discipline the students who had bullied his 12-year-old daughter when she was subject to the racist taunts.
“It makes me feel like the school district is sweeping this under the rug,” Ranco told the Austin-American-Statesman. “Georgetown ISD has had at least a few suicides in the last five years resulting from bullying. … I don’t have that concern for my daughter, but I’m sure other parents didn’t think their kids were suicidal, either.”
Ranco said that his daughter had been bullied at least three times. The first time was when a girl followed Ranco’s daughter around the tennis court with a long piece of trash “pretending to whip (the girl) and saying words to the effect of ‘You’re my slave now!’”
The second was when a lunchtime dispute had started, and when Ranco’s daughter pointed out the boy who had initiated the dispute, the boy denied it and asked, “You’re not really going to take the word of a black person over the word of a white person, are you?”
The third was when the girl who had pretended to whip Ranco’s daughter asked a boy why he was sitting in the seat he had chosen, and his response was “Because I don’t sit next to apes.”
The girl then pulled up a picture of an ape on her phone and told Ranco’s daughter, “This is what you look like.”
Ranco’s daughter replied, “That’s racist and mean. Stop it!”
But the girl continued to scroll through pictures of apes, “asking aloud which one look most like” Ranco’s daughter.
According to a report by the Georgetown school district, “all substantiated misbehavior by the involved students was addressed and consequences were assessed in accordance with our Georgetown I.S.D. Student Code of Conduct and with our campus restorative justice approach to discipline management.”
Details on the discipline were not available, but the district did say that they “provided additional re-teaching to students who engaged in inappropriate behaviors.”