‘THIS IMPACTS YOUR LIFE FOREVER’
Students of color challenge schools to do more to fight racism
In August 2016, three school security guards surrounded Mariah Harvard at Buckeye Union High School.
The guards repeatedly asked her about the shirt she was wearing underneath her sweatshirt, she said. Nervously, Harvard tugged on the T-shirt beneath her hoodie. The black T-shirt had words in white that read, “Black lives matter,” a nod to the movement started in 2013 calling for action against systemic racism.
She’d started wearing the shirt to school a week earlier, but was asked by
school administrators to stop after another student told her that “Black lives don’t matter.”
The demand didn’t sit right with Harvard. So, she gathered nine friends and walked out of class one morning in protest. Her stand made national headlines.
“It changed everything for me that day,” she said. “Protesting ... it changed me completely.”
People threatened to attack Harvard, she said. For a week, police officers sat outside her house late at night in case someone tried to hurt her. At a homecoming football game, another student accused her of defacing their Confederate flag, she said.
Four years later, now a student at Estrella Mountain Community College, Harvard has joined the crowds coming out to protest the deaths of Black men and women in police custody.
And like other Black graduates of Arizona schools who spoke to The Arizona Republic, she is also reflecting on her own experience of systemic racism at her high school.
“This impacts your life forever,” she said.
As police departments and corporations face public reckonings over systemic racism, schools, too, are confronting accusations of racism from current and former students and parents.
The Republic revisited more than a dozen racist incidents reported at metro Phoenix schools since 2016: Those incidents ranged from basketball spectators directing monkey noises at a Black player to students repeating the N-word over and over again in videos posted to social media.
Data shows that students of color are disproportionately disciplined in Arizona compared with white students.
Schools also fail to graduate Black students at the same rate as white students, according to state data, making a college degree difficult to achieve. Advocates say that schism is created by a school system that does not treat Black students fairly.
Students of color interviewed for this story said racism is embedded in the culture of schools across metro Phoenix.
Sometimes it is overt, like when a group of teens in a Gilbert school told Joe Gonzales’ daughter that her skin was ugly.
In other moments, students felt singled out for being Black, like when a teacher pulled Evanjalees Foster out of a Mesa classroom during a showing of Huckleberry Finn and asked her if she was uncomfortable as the only Black student in the classroom.
The students also said that solutions addressing racism did not come swiftly, if they came at all.
Some former students are calling on administrators to do more to fight racism in and out of the classroom, including addressing inadequate teaching about slavery and civil rights figures.
Leaders advocating for fair treatment of students of color said schools must go beyond adopting equity programs in order to truly eradicate racism in the classroom.
“We will definitely be asking the question ‘How are you going to keep our children safe in school in light of these racial tensions?’ ” Janelle Wood, with the Black Mothers Forum, said. “Your policies and your practices have in the past hurt our children.”
Reported incidents
The Arizona Republic tracked 18 incidents, including racist slurs, chants and graffiti, reported by local news outlets since May 2016:
● May 2016, Desert Vista High School in Ahwatukee Foothills: Desert Vista High students spelled the N-word out on T-shirts and posted the photo on Snapchat. The students involved were suspended.
● May 2016, Xavier College Preparatory in Phoenix: Xavier College Preparatory alumni and students decried a handout from a teacher that compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan . The sheet purported an overwhelming amount of aborted fetuses are Black and that more Black fetuses are aborted than born. A petition called for the teacher’s dismissal, but the school did not remove him.
● August 2016, Buckeye Union High School in Buckeye: Buckeye Union High School District’s superintendent apologized after Harvard was barred from wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt at school. Harvard also said a fellow student told her that “Black lives don’t matter” and that her shirt was “meaningless.”
February 2017, Red Mountain High School in Mesa: At a basketball game between Mountain Ridge High and Red Mountain High, spectators in the Red Mountain area of the bleachers made monkey noises, pounded their chests and scratched their armpits, in apparent racist gestures. One Black player was on the floor at the time.
● March 2017, Pinnacle High School in Phoenix: Swastikas and other racist graffiti including declarations of “white power” were removed from the walls of Pinnacle High School.
October 2017, Emerson Elementary School in Phoenix: Phoenix Elementary School District parents said the use of an online game that simulates slavery trivialized a complex and traumatic issue.
● 2018, Highland High School in Gilbert: A photo of Highland High School’s MAGA club using the OK hand gesture circulated around Twitter. The hand gesture is considered a symbol of hate by the Anti-Defamation League. It was designated as a hate symbol after white supremacists began using the gesture in photos, though the organization cautions that “someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context.”
● January 2018, Santan Junior High School in Chandler: A video on social media showed several Chandler students from Santan Junior High School chanting “(Expletive) all n-----s” in unison. The song they were singing leads with a lyric celebrating the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and recounts numerous racist stereotypes. The school’s principal said the students could not be punished because the incident occurred outside of school, but condemned the video. Parents protested, accusing the district of failing to address a pattern of racism.
● December 2018, ASU Prep in Phoenix: Phoenix students dressed up as Ku Klux Klan members in a high school play. School officials apologized for catching anyone “by surprise with the appearance of these characters.”
● 2019, Highland High School in Gilbert: A video of two Highland High students repeatedly saying the N-word circulated on social media. A Gilbert Public Schools spokeswoman said the students involved were disciplined.
● March 2019, Perry High School in Gilbert: East Valley NAACP’s president criticized MAGA gear in schools, saying the slogan has been used as a “racist dog whistle.” A “Party in the USA” spirit day led to a lunch-time altercation involving students wearing MAGA attire and carrying a Trump banner. Students were asked to put the banner away.
● March 2019, Mountain View High School in Mesa: Local TV station 12 News reported that a Mountain View High School student was accused on Twitter of making a poster that said, “If I was black I’d be picking cotton, but I’m White So I’m Picking YOU 4 Prom?” Mesa Public Schools wrote that it did not “condone” the message.
● March 2019, Mountainside Middle School in Scottsdale: Mountainside Middle School students were recorded saying the N-word during class. The district responded in a statement to local TV station ABC 15, saying that the intent of the lesson was to teach children why the word is racist and offensive.
● April 2019, BASIS Phoenix Central in Phoenix: The mother of a BASIS Phoenix Central student said a teacher singled out her 9-year-old son because he is Black and forced him to walk through his class as his teacher and students yelled at, humiliated and berated him during a lesson on school segregation.
● May 2019, Desert Vista High School in Ahwatukee: ABC 15 reported that Twitter account @real2019prank, named Desert Vista Senior Pranks, posted a plan for a prank where seniors were to pretend the school’s front gate was the border to Mexico. Tempe Union High School officials called the tweet unacceptable.
● October 2019, Caurus Academy in Anthem: At a girls volleyball game, spectators said members of the crowd cheering for charter school Caurus Academy referred to Salt River High School players, who are Native American, as “savages”. Other spectators reported racist acts including tribal war chants and so-called Tomahawk Chops. The Canyon Athletic Association ruled no sanctions against either team but promised equity and diversity efforts.
● April 2020, Campo Verde High School in Gilbert: A Campo Verde High student posted a racist Tik Tok viewed four million times, according to 12 News. The Tik Tok begins with the teen, who appears to be white, in the frame with the words “Here’s how to get away from the cops,” then the caption changes to “now that all the black people are here…” and a reference to the 3/5ths compromise and a picture of a cotton field is shown. The three-fifths compromise in 1787 counted three out of every five slaves as people for congressional purposes. The teen apologized.
● June 2020, Heritage Elementary School in Glendale: A Glendale charter school principal is no longer leading Heritage Elementary after an employee posted anti-Semitic and racist text messages from the principal, where he asked, “What do you get when you cross a black person and a Jewish person?” He next wrote, “The loudest/cheapest thief in town.”
‘Nothing was being done’
Following the death of George Floyd, as protests continued in Phoenix and other American cities, Ankoma Juma Hopwood, a Mesa High School alum, posted on Twitter on June 3: “I can almost guarantee that any person of color that attended high school at mesa, mountain view, highland and too many more to name experienced racism from their peers in some way shape or form.”
Hopwood, who is Black, asked graduates of East Valley area schools to share their own stories of racism. Dozens answered.
For days, Hopwood posted their replies, sometimes posting screenshots of private messages and concealing the identity of the former students.
One person wrote that they’d heard the N-word from white students countless times, and the students were never really punished. Another wrote that Highland High students took videos of themselves in a cotton field singing, “I’m a cotton-picking n----r.”
The experiences they described weren’t surprising to Hopwood.
He said he remembers when one of his friends politely asked another student to stop saying the N-word. He said the student replied that “it’s just a word” and they can say what they want.
“We tried to tell teachers, but nothing really ever happened when he told administration about that stuff,” he said. “It was always brushed off.”
Tyesha Saucedo attended Mountain Pointe High in Ahwatukee and graduated in 2015. Students brought Confederate flags to school, she said. Another student, she said, posted a photo of a swastika drawn on his arm and a racial slur. When she confronted the principal about the racist behavior, she was told officials couldn’t do anything about it, she said.
“After a while, I felt like I was fighting and fighting and fighting and nothing was being done,” Saucedo said.
Megan Sterling, a spokeswoman with Tempe Union, wrote in a statement that “teachers and administrators have historically been limited in the disciplinary actions they can take in regards to content/pictures posted on students’ social media.”
“We will definitely be asking the question ‘How are you going to keep our children safe in school in light of these racial tensions?’ Your policies and your practices have in the past hurt our children.” Janelle Wood Black Mothers Forum
Have schools addressed racism?
Parents and former students said they’ve repeatedly raised racist issues as a systemic pattern, only to receive underwhelming responses from school leaders.
But district officials say they’re trying.
When Desert Vista High students spelled out the N-word in T-shirts in a photo, the circulated image garnered national attention and demands for change. Sterling wrote that Tempe Union has strengthened its harassment and bullying policy and hired a diversity and inclusion coordinator in 2016 in the wake of the incident.
But former Tempe Union students don’t think the action was enough. The former students are now compiling data on how many students have been harassed while attending district schools. The alums are demanding swift procedures to deal with hate.
In 2018, Chandler parents crowded school district board meetings to protest racism in district schools, spurred by a video of junior high students chanting racist lyrics. One parent told board members, “You are rapidly on your way to being viewed as the most racist school district in America.”
The district resisted parents’ calls to punish students, but promised to hire a director of equity and inclusion to implement an equity framework in the district. Chandler hired Adama Sallu to
lead equity efforts, but the decision to implement an equity program roiled some members of a conservative-led parents group, Purple For Parents.
The Kyrene School District, also in the East Valley, similarly implemented an equity program after parents complained that Black students were being disciplined at higher rates than white students, confirmed by district data.
Wood, one of the voices calling for reform both in Chandler and Kyrene, said discipline issues still appear to disproportionately affect Black male students more than other groups. “They believe they know what to do so they pacify us and get an equity consultant. That’s just really surface,” she said.
And students and parents say they didn’t feel heard by their school districts when they raised issues of racism.
When Gilbert students bullied Gonzales’ daughter for the color of her skin, the father said he’d faced the same kind of discrimination when he was a student in Gilbert. His daughter experienced racism all throughout her time in school, he said. She graduated this year.
Whenever Gonzales would bring his concerns to district administrators, he said they would brush those concerns off and reply that they’d talk to offending students. “They didn’t feel that it was extreme to them, but at the same time, it was affecting my kids,” he said.
Monique Joseph, a Chandler parent, said Black children and parents are often falsely dismissed as troublemakers. She recently penned an open letter to the school district urging educators to examine the unfair treatment Black students receive in schools.
She wrote that her 6-year-old daughter has already had several incidents at Tarwater Elementary. At 5, Joseph wrote, her daughter was suspended because she kissed another child in the lunch line.
“They pulled my 5-year-old child from class in front of her peers, humiliated her, interrogated her and caused psychological trauma because she was doing what most 5-year-olds are notorious for doing,” she wrote.
In an interview with The Republic, Joseph said her experience is not unique among African American parents.
“These are issues that are systemic and that cause tremendous damage to parents and children in public schools,” she said.
Sallu, Chandler’s equity director hired in 2018, said change will take time. She has focused on training for all staff members, to help teachers realize and address biases impacting their treatment of students that they may not have realized they had. “Schools are really a microcosm of society,” she said.
Data informs her work as equity director, she said: Sallu looks at how many students of color are disciplined, graduation rates and enrollment in Advanced Placement classes. The district is tracking the data to assure students of color are getting the same opportunities as white students.
And teachers are listening, she said. More than 500 educators attended an equity symposium the district held last year.
But she knows there’s more work to do. Black parents and students are in pain, she said.
“The pain is real,” she said. “At CUSD, we hear their voice, we hear their pain. We’re doing all that we can to ensure that the learning space we have here is honorable.”
Calls for changes in curriculum
Private and charter schools are similarly seeing demands for reform.
Former students have asked prominent Arizona private and charter schools not only to examine outwardly racist incidents, but consider what they teach students in class.
Current and former students of Northland Preparatory Academy in Flagstaff sent an open letter to administrators and faculty stating that the school “has a long history of racism.”
More than 250 students signed the letter, and included reports of more than two dozen examples of microaggressions or racist comments, including several from Native American students who said they were the targeted.
They are asking the school to develop curricula that address issues of identity and privilege, develop an app for students to report incidents of bias and racist behaviors, implement a strategy to make the faculty and student body more reflective of the larger Flagstaff community, and take action to make the school more accessible to students from low-income families.
Alums of both Xavier College Preparatory, an all-girls Catholic school in Phoenix, and Phoenix Country Day School, a non-religious college prep school, sent petitions to administrators demanding change.
Graduates of Phoenix Country Day asked in their petition that the school dedicate money to help foster a more diverse student body, overhaul every grade’s curriculum “to provide a more honest education on the history of the subjugation of black people,” and ensure that at least 25% of articles and books read by students are by writers of color.
Black leaders have long said slavery is not taught accurately in schools. An analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that most textbooks fail to include critical details about people who were enslaved and their labor’s relationship to the economy.
Xavier graduates, too, asked for changes to the school’s curriculum, including the addition of bias training.
Lauren D’Souza, a 2014 graduate who helped organize the petition to Xavier, said the petition received more than 1,600 signatures when organizers sent it to school administrators.
School leaders in their response to the petition wrote that they shared the concerns in the petition, but did not directly say how they would address each point.
The goal, D’Souza said, is to prompt action. Some of the former students who signed shared personal stories about attending Xavier, she said, calling the demands long overdue.
“We’re sending thoughts and prayers to the Black communities of the United States but not reflecting inwards and saying here’s what we’re going to do to support our Black students,” she said.