The father of a 12-year-old girl who is being targeted by racist bullies is speaking out after he said that the school did not properly discipline the students involved in the hurtful and hateful attacks.
According to a written report from the school, the Austin American-Statesman reports, one girl at Tippit Middle School in Georgetown, Texas, told the girl back in May that she looked like an ape and also referred to the child as a slave while pretending to whip her. Other students, both boys, also made a racial remark to the little girl.
The girl’s father, identified as Robert Ranco, claims that the school didn’t discipline any of the students involved in his daughter’s torment. None of them were even suspended. He claims that the Georgetown Independent School District won’t even refer to the incidents as bullying.
“It makes me feel like the school district is sweeping this under the rug,” Ranco, who is a civil rights lawyer, told the news site. “Georgetown ISD has had a 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.”
According to the American-Statesman, the school district did not respond to a request for comment last week, but the school report acknowledges that Ranco’s daughter “was a victim of more than one incident of racially harassing conduct from classmates.”
The report claimed that “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.”
The document did not give any details about the discipline but said that the school “provided additional re-teaching to students who engaged in inappropriate behaviors.”
If this isn’t some bullshit. You have kids tormenting a 12-year-old child and they don’t even get sent home for the day?
According to Ranco, the bullying began in March when a girl followed Ranco’s daughter around a 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!’” according to the report. Apparently no one on the school’s staff saw the incident occur.
Then, again in March, Ranco’s daughter pointed out a white male student in the cafeteria who had caused some kind of dispute during lunchtime. The little boy reportedly claimed, “It wasn’t me. You’re not going to really take the word of a black person over the word of a white person, are you?”
Seems as if someone is picking up life lessons at home, doesn’t it?
At any rate, Ranco said that he and his daughter met with a school counselor in March about what happened, and the boy apologized to Ranco’s daughter.
And then there was a third incident in May, at which the same little girl who had pretended to whip Ranco’s daughter asked a male student nearby why he was sitting there, to which the male student reportedly responded, “Because I don’t sit next to apes,” before moving away from Ranco’s daughter.
The little girl then proceeded to hold up a picture of an ape on her cellphone and say to Ranco’s daughter, “This is what you look like.”
Ranco’s daughter reportedly responded, “That’s racist and mean. Stop it!”
However, the little shit girl kept on scrolling through photos of apes and “asking aloud which one looked most like” Ranco’s daughter as other students laughed, according to the report.
And y’all, I applaud Ranco’s daughter, because she has the patience of Job and the self-control of a saint.
“It’s hard not to think kids learned this behavior from their parents,” Ranco said. “That’s part of the problem.”
You said that right, Ranco. He said that he asked the school’s principal not to allow the students to take part in an athletic competition the next day, but apparently even that request was not acknowledged.
Read more at the Austin American-Statesman.