Pennridge School District has created hostile environment for Black and LGBTQ students, federal complaint says

The Pennridge School District has failed to protect children of color and LGBTQ students from harassment, and policies rescinding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, banning Pride flags and restricting which restrooms transgender people can use have only worsened the discrimination, a federal complaint says.

The complaint, filed Wednesday by the Education Law Center and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic, asks the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to order the Bucks County district to take a series of actions.

Those include establishing an equity team, providing a culturally responsive curriculum, and making books with themes on gender and sexuality available to students. The filing also asks the district to expressly prohibit the use of racial slurs — described by the complaint as pervasive in the Pennridge district, which is more than 80% white.

There were “really horrific instances of Black students being called the N-word repeatedly, LGBTQ students being told things like lesbians should die,” Cara McClellan, the Penn clinic’s director, said in an interview Wednesday.

Parents initially approached the clinic with those stories, McClellan said. But “as we learned more about the policies” the district had enacted in recent years, it became clear the policies “actually exacerbate” what students were experiencing, she said.

The school district did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pennridge has about 6,500 students from several towns in Upper Bucks County in 11 schools.

The Pennridge school board — which has been led by Republicans and disbanded its equity initiative in 2021 as conservatives accused the district of teaching “critical race theory” — will change hands in December following a Democratic sweep of the district’s school board races earlier this month.

Annamarie Hufford-Bucklin, certified legal intern with the Penn clinic, said that the new board could make changes but that, given how long the harassment has persisted, a deeper redress was warranted.

“This is really students and parents saying, ‘Enough is enough,’” Hufford-Bucklin said.

The complaint was filed on behalf of the NAACP of Bucks County and the Pair Up Society, a local group supporting underrepresented students, as well as four students and a teacher. Their names are redacted from the 77-page complaint, but their experiences, dating to 2018, are detailed.

In one instance, a Black and Latinx 10th grader confronted a white student who had called him the racist term in a video circulating on Snapchat, then told him: “You’re not going to do nothing about it, little boy,” according to the complaint. The two got into a fight at school this fall that involved another Black and Latinx student, who had stepped in.

The Black and Latinx students, who told their principal the fight stemmed from the white student using the racist term, were suspended, banned from extracurricular activities, and issued criminal charges, according to the complaint. The white student was also suspended but for less time, McClellan said. The school, meanwhile, never addressed the underlying racism, the complaint says — including previous times the students and their families had reported that other students were harassing them with the racist term.

“If the school had intervened or addressed the use of racial slurs, and not put it on students to deal with this on their own,” McClellan said, Black students wouldn’t be in this position where “they start to feel they are not seen as part of the school community, not seen as worthy.”

The complaint also describes discrimination against LGBTQ students and teachers, including a recent queer graduate who witnessed students dumping trash on other queer students’ heads as they tried to use the restroom.

The student didn’t feel safe in school and enrolled in online learning, but returned in person for the 2022-23 school year, according to the complaint. But the student “felt less safe” after the district passed its policy prohibiting staff “advocacy” — including the classroom display of Pride flags — and requirements that guidance counselors inform parents of a student’s request to change pronouns.

The complaint also describes a transgender man who taught at Pennridge from 2017 until this fall, who felt “isolated and targeted” by the district’s policies. When the superintendent instructed staff members they couldn’t display Pride flags, the teacher worried about displaying a photo of him and his partner.

And when the board earlier this year barred transgender people from using restrooms matching their gender identity, the teacher — who had not openly shared his trans identity — “was forced to choose between outing himself to students and co-workers by using the women’s room or walking far across the school to access a single-user non-gendered bathroom,” according to the complaint. He used the single-user restroom — risking leaving students unsupervised, given the distance from his classroom.

The teacher suffered psychological and “severe physical impacts caused by irregular access to bathrooms,” according to the complaint, which says he left the district after having a panic attack during teacher conferences ahead of the start of the school year.

Other actions cited in the complaint include curriculum changes — including Pennridge’s embrace of Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum — and removals of books that “overwhelmingly have themes related to race, gender and sexuality.”

The U.S. Department of Education will decide whether to investigate the complaint — a process that has been playing out for more than a year in nearby Central Bucks, where the American Civil Liberties Union last October filed a complaint alleging that the district had created a hostile environment for LGBTQ students.

Not only are Pennridge’s policies and practices hurting students psychologically and socially, Hufford-Bucklin said, but the climate also is causing students to “disengage from school.” In interviews, parents said they were considering leaving Pennridge, while some students have switched to online learning.

“It’s stopping them from obtaining the education that’s their right to obtain,” she said.