Two Albuquerque, N.M., high school juniors were suspended after posting a disgusting, doctored image to Snapchat that the school’s principal is calling “repugnant and hateful.”
According to KOB, the photo that was uploaded showed one lone African-American student surrounded by her classmates wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods that had been digitally placed over their faces.
Some idiot posted the image to the Volcano Vista High School’s Snapchat group, and thankfully, some other students with good sense and a moral compass reported the image to school administrators.
“It was awful,” Mary Morrow-Webb, the mother of the student in the picture, told the news station. “It was frightening. I just really got sick to my stomach. I was afraid for my daughters and for the other children there that are at risk for these types of threats.”
Albuquerque Public Schools didn’t come up with excuses and immediately launched an investigation that resulted in the 10-day suspension of two students. One of those students was also kicked off the football team.
Of course, the boys who posted the picture claimed that it was meant to be a “joke.” I’m not sure how many times we’re going to have to repeat “Racist shit ain’t funny” until these troglodytes get it.
“You don’t expect your kids going to school and having to deal with racism and discrimination in 2017,” the girl’s father, Lamont Webb, said. “It’s kind of appalling.”
The Webb family said that their daughters—the student in the photo and her two sisters, who also attend the school—have not gone back to the school since the picture went up.
“And now they say they can’t go back,” Morrow-Webb said. “And we can’t afford to send our daughters to private school, so what options do they have? They finally have broken my girls. So what do we do?”
This is reportedly the last straw for the family, who claim that they have been reporting the racism and bullying their daughters have faced at the school over the last three years, to no avail.
“We’ve been coming in with complaints of my daughter saying someone called her the n-word,” Webb said. “Someone called her a porch monkey and different things like that on a regular basis.”
Albuquerque Public Schools, for its part, said that the previous incidents involving racist bullying at the school occurred under another administration and that the school has a new principal who is looking to make big changes.
“The fact is that she is out to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” APS Superintendent Raquel Reedy said. “She is adamant that the school is going to be safe for every single student that attends, and I would encourage any parent who has any concerns to contact Ms. [Vickie] Bannerman because she will look into it and they would be heard.”
Bannerman sent a letter home to parents, detailing the incident with the photo and decrying it in no uncertain terms.
“We expect all students to be treated with dignity and respect, and we deem unacceptable all acts of discrimination and harassment including but not limited to sexual, racial and religious,” Bannerman wrote in the letter.
Reedy said that APS is very serious about investigating the photo and showed the image to the police.
“We took this to our police department,” she said. “They came and investigated and are really looking very carefully at whether we should file charges for hate crimes. This is something we’re looking at very carefully because it’s this serious.”
Read more at KOB.