‘Nobody thinks it’s happening’: Parents decry racism – and denial – in Boise-area schools

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of racial incidents and quotations of racial slurs.

Anna Marie Young has kept a record of every time her children, who are biracial, faced racist comments or bullying in their West Ada district schools since 2022.

There was the time classmates called her 13-year-old son an “overgrown monkey,” and the time a student called her daughter a “thing” and an “animal.” Once, Young wrote, a student told her niece to go to the back of a line because she was Black. Young’s timeline, which she shared with the Idaho Statesman, lists nearly 20 incidents in which the kids experienced harassment.

She’s kept the record, she said, because she was concerned that the school district wasn’t adequately tracking the incidents, and because she has often felt that the concerns she raises to school officials are discounted or brushed aside as ordinary bullying.

“This is stuff that my kids are hearing,” she said. “And I feel like nobody thinks it’s happening.”

In mid-November, Young was part of a group of parents who spoke at a school board meeting where the district approved a new antidiscrimination policy. Weeks before the meeting, she rallied 22 parents from 13 West Ada schools to send a letter to the district outlining four requested changes to the then-proposed policy. Only one – a requirement that all allegations of discrimination be reported to the school district – was accepted.

In conversations with the Statesman, Young and other parents who attended the meeting said they appreciated the policy change, calling it a step in the right direction. But several expressed trepidation about whether the policy would be fully enforced – and even if it were, whether that would really help solve a problem that has felt intractable.

Their doubts, they said, stemmed from years of frustration as they tried to combat racist harassment among students but faced seeming inaction from officials – and often, denial that racism was even a real problem in the district.

Niki Scheppers, a spokesperson for the West Ada School District, said the district treats concerns about discrimination as a “serious matter,” as demonstrated by its existing policies and its most recent policy changes.

“It’s an ongoing initiative (of) outlining specific measures that can maintain compliance with state and federal regulations to assure effective policy implementation,” she told the Statesman by phone. Superintendent Derek Bub regularly meets with student councils, parent advisory committees and staff leadership teams to discuss bullying- and harassment-related concerns, reflecting the district’s “inclusive and respectful environment” that seeks input “from all stakeholders,” she said.

West Ada is Idaho’s largest school district, with 40,000 students. The district has nearly 60 schools, including 13 high schools, and covers nearly 400 square miles of Ada County, including Meridian, Eagle, Star and parts of Boise, Garden City and unincorporated Ada County.

Despite denials, racism is ‘alive and well’ in Idaho, parents say

When Rich Williams’ daughter was a third-grader at St. Marks Elementary School, decades ago, her school’s playground shared a fence with the Boise School District’s Fairmont Junior High. One day, students from that school told her that they were going to throw a rope around her neck, hook it up to the back of a pickup truck, and drive, he recalled. Over the years, during which she mostly attended schools in what was then the Meridian School District, she was targeted multiple times at school for being Black, he said.

Williams has been raising concerns since 1984 about racism and harassment in Boise-area schools, he told the Idaho Statesman, but little has changed. Back then, West Ada was far smaller and more rural. In 1990, Meridian had fewer than 10,000 residents, compared with over 140,000 in 2024, according to data from the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho.

At the November school board meeting, he expressed frustration at the new district policy’s limited scope.

“Over the course of 40 years, this issue has remained the same, and nobody has taken the time to adequately address it,” Williams told the board.

Only 1% of Idaho’s population is Black, and less than 20% of the state’s population is nonwhite, including Black, Asian, Latino and Native American residents, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2022, just over 1% of Ada County’s population was Black, according to Compass data.

Parents in the West Ada School District said they have often encountered an irony in these numbers. Their children have faced particular harassment because they are so small a minority – in many cases, a child is the only Black student in the classroom – but their concerns have been downplayed because of a sense that the incidents affect so few students, they said.

Some parents recounted efforts to move their children among classrooms or schools in the district to keep Black students together for support. More than one described the discomfort a child faced as the only Black student in class during conversations about race – for example, while studying “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a book that includes racial slurs. Parents say that the book is valuable but that teachers are sometimes unprepared to lead sensitive discussions about the language used, or to prevent students from using those words outside the classroom.

But Williams said trying to mitigate the problem by moving children to other classrooms or schools is like “jumping from a frying pan into a fire.”

“You’re not going to avoid it that way,” he said. “It’s in every school.”

Through involvement with Brown Like Me, a Boise-area organization that offers educational activities and mentorship for Black children and their families, Williams and other parents have heard from students how pervasive racial harassment is throughout the Treasure Valley, not just in the West Ada School District.

For Young’s family, the problems started in 2021, as soon as her children started attending West Ada schools. She said her children faced insults from students and once, a teacher, about their hair and appearance. At times, these escalated into physical attacks from the same students who had previously made insulting comments, Young said.

Young reported the incidents to principals and guidance counselors but got an “unbelievable” response, she said. In some cases, teachers took days and multiple emails to respond. One guidance counselor downplayed an incident as a student just being “silly and jokey.”

“I had to educate them that this was discrimination,” she said. “It wasn’t just regular harassment.”

She learned that under district policy at that time, principals were not obligated to report allegations of discrimination to the district, and she worried that when her son transitioned from elementary school to middle school, the children who had harassed him would be starting with a clean slate.

The district, meanwhile, aims to address incidents at the lowest level possible, ideally within the building, Scheppers said. And because of privacy regulations, the district cannot always provide victims’ families with closure, she said.

“We try to be extremely confidential in handling those (incidents) out of respect for the children, the students, who are most often minors, because it is an extremely sensitive topic,” she said. “So while families might not always feel that they get actionable results, that’s probably because we cannot always share the discipline involved with the family. So sometimes, they are left with unanswered questions.”

Parents who reported students’ harassment told the Statesman that they were disturbed by the incidents’ prevalence – but perhaps more so by a sense that school officials and other community members were in denial.

That denial can add more harm after a student hears a racist remark, said Shari Baber, the founder of Brown Like Me and a former West Ada parent.

“White folks who try to do good will say stuff to the students, like, ‘Well, they didn’t mean it like that,’ or ‘You shouldn’t have taken it like that,’ ” Baber said. “That puts the trauma back on the kid.”

“White people with white kids, they send their kids to school, and they don’t think anything’s going on,” Young said. “Well, of course you don’t know, because you’re white, and your kids are white. So how would you know that discrimination exists?”

Said Baber: “Idaho likes to say that we don’t have any racism. While we might not have racism that looks the same as other places, racism is alive and well.”

Racism persists in ‘gray area,’ teachers union president says

Schools don’t exist in a microcosm. Teachers and administrators can’t control the beliefs and ideas students may absorb from home or elsewhere in the community, so discrimination against minority groups is difficult to eliminate, said Zachary Borman, the president of the West Ada Education Association, the district’s teachers union.

But he and parents advocated for more training and education among teachers and administrators about cultural sensitivity and the seriousness of these incidents. Borman said he hoped such training would incorporate the murkiness and nuance of some encounters.

“That’s where this problem exists, like the gray area of it,” he said.

Though he acknowledged that some slurs were likely used between students “on a regular basis,” he assessed that in the vast majority of cases, it’s “kids doing and saying stupid things.”

“A large portion are not understanding how bad this word can hurt, or misunderstanding their relationship, or misunderstanding their ability to utilize those words (compared with) what they see in pop culture and whatnot,” he said. “The question to me then becomes, what is reportable?”

From the perspective of a teacher who witnesses an incident in isolation, “it might just seem like one little paper cut,” he said. But over time, those encounters can add up to “terrible injuries.”

By contrast, teachers who abruptly correct students’ behavior can have a positive impact, said Carolyn Bruce, a parent who spoke at the mid-November school board meeting.

Students made an unspecified racist comment toward her child, she shared at the meeting, but a teacher nearby heard the remark. The teacher “called it out right away, called it what it was and shut it down,” she told school board members. “And my kid had a wonderful experience from there forward.”

With lawsuit alleging racism, Eagle family seeks public awareness

In June, one father put the school district on notice of a lawsuit after his daughters faced years of harassment from classmates and teachers at Eagle High School, the Statesman previously reported. According to the claim he filed, the district failed to act despite repeated meetings between the family and administrators. Instead, the superintendent blamed the behavior on “the climate and culture of the school,” according to the claim.

In July, Bub declined to comment on the claim, citing pending litigation. However, he told the Statesman, “Our priority, as always, remains the well-being and integrity of our students, staff and community.” Scheppers said the district thoroughly investigates such allegations “to ensure corrective action if needed.”

As of early December, the family was in conversations with the school district but was still planning to sue, largely to ensure that its case and others like it aren’t “brushed under the rug,” Max Williams, the family’s attorney and no relation to Rich Williams, told the Statesman.

“We do believe that this is for public consumption,” Max Williams said. “The public needs to know.”

Max Williams said the district’s recent policy change was a positive step, but that it didn’t go far enough.

“Overall, there is a lack of accountability by the school, the school district, the administrators, and they all sort of just turn a blind eye to each other,” he said. “Nobody’s holding anybody else accountable, and the students and parents who do complain and have complained in the past – from my understanding – it’s a lot of lip service. ‘We hear you, we’re going to handle it,’ and then nothing happens.”

In their letter before the mid-November meeting, parents made three other requests of the district. They sought improved, more timely communication from the district to confirm that it had received a parent’s discrimination allegation, as well as written documentation of how it resolved the concern. They sought increased training and education for students and staff about what discrimination looks like and how to combat it. And they sought the creation of a task force of students, parents, teachers and administrators focused on discrimination concerns.

Though the district didn’t incorporate these items into its new policy, Young said the final item may still occur organically, as she and the other parents who signed the letter continue to work together.

After all, she said, her youngest son is in kindergarten, and he looks just like her oldest.

“Here we go again,” she said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”