LUBBOCK, Texas — The meeting of the local NAACP chapter began with a prayer — and then the litany of injustices came pouring out.
A Black high school football player was called a “bitch ass” n-word by White players during a game in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a White girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a White teacher of having a vape pen — it was a pencil sharpener — and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this past fall.
“They’re breaking people,” said Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader of the NAACP chapter in this northwest Texas city, referring to local schools’ treatment of Black children. “It’s just open season on our students.”
The incidents described at the meeting this past fall illustrate a long-standing problem in Lubbock County — where about 8 percent of residents are Black — that parents and advocates said the Biden administration had attempted to address.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in 2023 launched investigations into an area school district, Lubbock-Cooper, after several alleged incidents of racial bullying shocked the community and made national headlines. A year ago, an investigator from that office was planning to visit the area, community members said, and complainants hoped that afterward, the federal government could negotiate a set of protections for students with the Lubbock-Cooper school district.
Then the 2024 presidential election happened — and the visit didn’t. In March, the Trump administration closed seven of the Education Department’s 12 regional civil rights enforcement offices, including the one in Dallas, which had been investigating complaints about Lubbock. Emails from the lawyer representing the families to the federal investigator bounced back — like hundreds of other OCR employees, she had been terminated.
Since then, race relations in school districts in and around Lubbock have taken a turn for the worse, many parents and educators said. While they didn’t expect the federal government to bring a halt to racist incidents, the possibility of an agreement between the government and school districts provided them a sense of accountability. The NAACP chapter now fields frequent calls from parents seeking help in addressing racial incidents, Gant said — incidents they no longer bother to report to the Education Department.
During President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the agency has not publicly announced a single investigation into racial discrimination against Black students, while prioritizing investigations of alleged discrimination affecting White students, antisemitism complaints and policies regarding transgender students.
All told this year, the Education Department under Trump has dismissed thousands of civil rights investigations. During the first six months of this year, OCR required schools to make changes and agree to federal monitoring in 59 cases, compared with 336 during the same period last year, a Washington Post analysis found.
“In many of our communities, where people feel isolated and like they didn’t have anyone to turn to, OCR mattered and gave people a sense of hope,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, a lawyer at the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education policy and legal advocacy group that helped file some of the civil rights complaints against Lubbock schools. “And it matters that they’ve essentially destroyed it.”
In an email about the Lubbock complaints, Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs for the Education Department, wrote, “These complaints of racial bullying were filed in 2022 and 2023, meaning that the Biden Administration had more time to investigate this than the Trump Administration has even been in office. The Trump Administration’s OCR will continue vigorously enforcing the law to uphold all Americans’ civil rights.” She did not respond to a question about whether the agency had opened any investigations into discrimination against Black students since Trump took office.
Some White residents also said they have noticed a change. Tracey Benefield — who has two children in Hutchinson Middle School in the Lubbock Independent School District, which borders Lubbock-Cooper district — said her son has witnessed multiple incidents of racial bullying over the past year.
“My son was walking down the hall with his friend who’s Black and some kid shoulder-checked him and called him the n-word. That’s been one of many,” she said. Lubbock district officials did not directly respond to questions about Benefield’s claims.
Benefield, who is active in community causes, said she thinks the OCR’s retreat, among other changes within the federal government, has had an impact. “People are more emboldened,” she said. “People have always had racist ideas, but now there’s no consequences for being racist.”
Before Trump’s election to a second term, the concerns of parents and civil rights groups were quite different: Many were frustrated that OCR cases could linger for years as overworked investigators tracked down details and testimonies. Some parents were starting to advocate for more OCR staff and speedier resolutions. The outcry from residents that started in 2022, along with the media attention, prompted the Lubbock-Cooper and nearby Slaton school districts — where Black students make up about 3 and 5 percent of the student bodies, respectively — to adopt policies of mandatory in-school suspension for students caught making racial slurs and spurred training for staff.
But for many, the changes weren’t enough.
In 2022, Tracy Kemp’s eldest son, Brady, then an eighth-grader, was one of nine Black students whose pictures were put on an Instagram page called “LBMS Monkeys,” which stood for “Laura Bush Middle School Monkeys.” (Brady is being referred to by the nickname he goes by, and his last name is not being used because he is a minor.) Kemp was part of a group of parents in the Lubbock-Cooper school district who filed civil rights complaints that year over what they said was a toxic racial atmosphere. White students would sometimes play whipping noises on their phones when Black students walked through the halls, according to the complaints. Despite a school district investigation that included asking for help from the FBI, those responsible were never identified.
Lubbock-Cooper officials said via email that they “responded swiftly and appropriately” to the 2022 incident at Laura Bush Middle School. “Efforts of the district to ensure all students feel valued, supported, and a sense of belonging have contributed to the positive, nurturing environment our campuses strive to maintain,” wrote Sadie Alderson, the district’s executive director of public information.
The Instagram page was taken down, but the taunting and bullying didn’t let up, Kemp said. The final straw came one day when Brady, then a ninth-grader at Lubbock Cooper High School, didn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher told him he was a criminal who was breaking the law, Kemp said, and the harassment started up again, this time on Snapchat, with the same language as the Instagram page.
In July 2023, Kemp moved with her family to New Mexico. Leaving Lubbock-Cooper, she said, was life-changing for her kids’ mental health.
“Honestly, it’s a lot easier,” said Brady, now a 12th-grader. “There’s no arguments, there’s nothing to worry about, really. I just focus on school more than anything.”
Others who have stayed say they’ve paid a price. Last December, Ja’Maury, then a 12-year-old, whose last name is not being used because he is a minor, learned of rumors that he’d touched a White girl’s breast during school. He went to administrators at the school, McCool Academy, to tell them the truth. But the assistant principal believed the girl and radioed a police officer, who interrogated Ja’Maury and threatened him with jail unless he confessed, according to Ja’Maury and his grandfather Mike Anzley.
Alone in a room of adults, Ja’Maury broke down and admitted to something he said never happened.
“He was yelling and threatening to send me to juvie if I didn’t say I did it. I was scared,” Ja’Maury recalled in an interview. “It was a White person’s word against a Black person’s word.”
Other parents say racist incidents have continued to go unchecked.
Naquelia Edwards said her son, who plays football for Lubbock-Cooper High School, was repeatedly called the n-word by players from an opposing team during a game in the fall, but when she complained to school administrators, the students weren’t punished.
Jessika Ogden, mother of the 11th-grade honors student who was wrongly accused of having a vape pen, said she believes her daughter was racially profiled. She filed a grievance against Coronado High School to keep her daughter from being sent to the district’s detention school, which she said she eventually won. But her daughter missed school while the case was being resolved, Ogden said, as she refused to send her to the detention school. “Had I not fought for my daughter, she would have suffered that punishment, missing more class, more credits,” Ogden said.
Gant, the 62-year-old NAACP leader, said that growing up in Lubbock she never experienced the kind of racism she sees now. In interviews, more than a dozen Black high school students in Lubbock said they regularly heard other students use the n-word. “Slurs happen all the time — it don’t matter what time of day it is,” said a 10th-grader from Lubbock Independent School District’s Coronado High School, whose name is being withheld because she is a minor.
Gant noted changes the local districts have made in the wake of the OCR investigation and parent activism. Administrators in Lubbock-Cooper sometimes proactively contact her about a parent concern, she said. In Lubbock Independent School District, Gant credits the director of student and parent resolutions, Brian Ellyson, for helping parents resolve conflicts in a principled manner and attending the NAACP meeting to hear them out.
But despite some improvements, Gant said the absence of an actual agreement between the federal government and the school districts in Lubbock County means the environment in schools hasn’t fundamentally changed. Such agreements typically result in teacher training, data collection and penalties for failing to comply.
Emails obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests show that Kulsoom Naqvi, the OCR investigator based in the Dallas office, conducted staff surveys, data requests and several rounds of interviews during much of 2024, but the work came to a halt that fall. Naqvi, who is not technically separated from the Education Department because of ongoing litigation over the mass firings at the Education Department, said she could not comment on the case.
Alderson, the spokesperson for Lubbock-Cooper, said that the investigation into the school district is officially still open, but the current superintendent, hired in June, was not aware of any communication from an OCR investigator. She said the district had sought mediation with OCR in spring 2024 but the investigator, Naqvi, had denied that request, and had not given Lubbock-Cooper a timeline for resolving the complaints.
Meanwhile, Anzley is still fighting for justice for his grandson, Ja’Maury.
After Ja’Maury confessed under pressure to something he didn’t do, the 12-year-old was assigned 30 days at Priority Intervention Academy, Lubbock Independent School District’s detention school, where children are sent for offenses determined to be too severe for in-school suspension. Constantly anxious, he reverted to sleeping in his grandfather’s bed like he did as a toddler. At the detention school, he said he was so afraid of defying adults that he twice wet his pants rather than challenge a teacher who said he couldn’t leave class to use the bathroom.
“He had never been in trouble before,” Anzley said. He’d always taught Ja’Maury to trust adults, and said he was devastated by the adults at McCool betraying that trust. “I had to make him distinguish right from wrong in a whole new way.”
Anzley filed a formal grievance with the district and, according to a copy of the findings shared with The Hechinger Report, administrators agreed to wipe the incident from Ja’Maury’s discipline file, issue a formal apology and provide training in discipline and due process to both McCool administrators and the officer who interrogated the boy.
McCool administrators did not respond to requests for comment. Amanda Castro-Crist, executive director of communications and community relations for Lubbock ISD, wrote in an email that the district could not discuss individual students because of federal laws protecting student privacy, but that it “is proud to serve a diverse student body.”
After the district declined to discipline the White girl for making the accusation, Anzley said, and with OCR no longer seeming like an option for redress, he’s hoping to find a lawyer to file a civil rights lawsuit.
The district’s apology and commitment to better train administrators did not undo the damage to Ja’Maury, he and his grandfather said. “People kept on messing with me about it, saying I was a pedophile, saying I was a pervert,” said the middle-schooler. “After that I almost hated life, I didn’t even want to live no more after that. That was horrible.”
This past fall, Anzley decided to transfer Ja’Maury from McCool — a top-rated school he once loved, which is 9 percent Black — to Dunbar College Preparatory Academy, which is 45 percent Black and received an F rating for academic performance in the past school year from the Texas Education Agency. The move was necessary for his grandson’s mental health, Anzley said, but Ja’Maury misses the learning opportunities at McCool.
“The districts know that OCR has been dismantled so there’s no urgency to fix these issues,” said Gant. “It’s on the community, and it’s on the parents to be factual, vocal and not quit.”
This story about federal investigations was produced in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
The post Epithets and accusations: Probes into racism in schools stall under Trump appeared first on Washington Post.
