The Effingham County, Georgia, school system is run by racists who blatantly mistreat black students.
Several black students’ parents are suing for an injunction to stop the discrimination (read their lawsuit here). That isn’t enough. The school district needs to be under ongoing federal court monitoring.
There’s precedent for that; across the country, federal judges have put several big-city police departments with a track record of racism under court-appointed monitors to ensure compliance with court-ordered reforms.
I originally posted here about a 13-year-old black girl being kicked out of a high school football game for wearing a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt while white students were allowed to wear Confederate paraphernalia, and school officials brushing off complaints about a noose and the “N”-word scrawled on a locker.
It just got far worse. Now a black former student has come forward with far more shocking allegations of egregious behavior by school officials. He’s Isaiah Jobe-Winn, who transferred out of Effingham schools after a “retaliation spree” against him for reporting racist Snapchat messages to school officials.
Those Snapchat messages included “the N-word and threats to ‘assassinate them,’ ‘execute them,’ ‘set tazers to kill,’ ‘cut their toes off everytime they run away’ and ‘We gon teach em about Americas,’” Raw Story says (here).
Jobe-Winn, who has joined the lawsuit, says he was “admonished” for reporting those messages and ordered to write an apology. But that was only the beginning; when he transferred out of the district, his former school withheld his transcripts for months, and when they were finally sent to his new school, they had altered his grades, dropping A’s to C’s, lowering his GPA, and put “bogus disciplinary infractions” in his school records.
If this is proven in court, Jobe-Winn should get a substantial monetary settlement, and the school personnel responsible for altering his student records should be criminally prosecuted for forgery. But the problem is bigger than his case. The school board and administration should be replaced, and the school system placed under federal court supervision until the out-of-control racism in Effingham County’s public education system is eradicated.