Hundreds of students, parents and alumni confronted South Colonie Central School District school leaders at a Tuesday night Board of Education meeting over administrators' response to a racist video made by white students.
The roughly 10-second video shows white Colonie Central High School students repeatedly yelling the N-word at a party. The video went viral in the week leading up to the meeting.
The students, alumni and parents who addressed the board Tuesday say this isn't the first racist incident school administrators have swept under the rug — both this school year and going back decades.
WAMC's Grant Ashley went to Tuesday's Board of Education meeting, and caught up with Northeast Notebook hosts Sam Dingman Aaron Shellow-Lavine. Here's their conversation.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dingman: Some students and families at South Colonie Central School District are calling for change in the administration after a racist video made by some of the district's high school students went viral. For more, we are joined by WAMC Capital Region Bureau Chief Grant Ashley. Hello, Grant.
Ashley: Hi, guys.
Shellow-Lavine: So, for those who haven't heard, tell us about this video.
Ashley: It's a maybe 10-second selfie video, and it shows some white male high school students in a living room, and several of them are yelling the N-word. It's been shared all over all sorts of social media platforms. The version I found was on Instagram, and it was a screen grab of a Facebook post, right? So it's getting circulated by a lot of different people. And just for those who aren't familiar with the Capital Region, Colonie is a suburb between Schenectady and Albany. And just to give you an idea of what this district is like, the student body is 56% white and 10% Black.
Dingman: So you went last night, Grant, to the district's Board of Education meeting. What was that like?
Ashley: My understanding is these are normally held in a district office. This one was held at Saddlewood Elementary School, and it was packed. I mean, hundreds of people, the seats were full. You had people standing out in the hallway and along all the walls. There were also multiple Colonie police officers there just to make sure things didn't get out of hand, I guess. And they let current students speak first, and they described earlier incidents of white students saying the N-word at homecoming and elsewhere with little to no consequences. Tiana Kirtley was one of the students describing those racist incidents to the Board of Education last night, and she got a little emotional during her speech.
Kirtley: It is so ridiculous to me that I, a 16-year-old Black girl, have to stand here and practically beg adults to realize that racism is wrong. But still, I stand here and urge you to condemn the racism in your school as blatantly and deliberately as it itself is. The well-being and safety of your students depend on it. If you truly care, punish the people who continue to go unpunished.
Ashley: And some students say they were punished more severely for addressing this video than the students who were in that original video were punished. One student said he was punished for posting his own video addressing the issue, and students who participated in a walkout on Friday were suspended for three days or more.
Dingman: Yes, we spoke about this a little bit on the show yesterday, Grant. That the students in the video, if I'm not mistaken, they were asked to leave school once the video was discovered, but then they were back in class the next day.
Ashley: That's my understanding too. It's a little bit difficult to tell because, as we'll get into, the school district can't release student disciplinary records. But yeah, more students walked out Monday, and that included students in other school districts in the area.
Dingman: And so those Monday walkouts were were protests against the district's reaction to the video.
Ashley: Correct. And the district took a much softer tone to those walkouts on Monday. The superintendent, David Perry, said in a statement the night before that "students have the right to express their views peacefully and respectfully." Some parents and students also criticized the district for having police at the student walkouts. They say that could have ended really poorly. And then former students and parents described an administration that has not taken racism seriously going back decades. One parent said that her then-elementary school age child, who is Black, was called racist insults and threatened with Klan violence. And a grandmother who went to this school district and currently has grandkids there said the same stuff was happening in the 70s and 80s when she was a student, and it also wasn't addressed.
Shellow-Lavine: So coming back to this most recent incident at the school and in the district, what do parents and students want to see from the school as far as a response goes?
Ashley: There were some calls to look over the code of conduct and make that less discretionary, right? So people were pointing out, "Hey, the definition of insubordination or whatever seems a little bit loose, and you know you have a very wide range of punishments here. How are we deciding who gets what punishment? Is that based on skin color at all, whether conscious or not?" A lot of speakers said they wanted more representation on the board and in the administration, and there was one parent who spoke at the meeting, Andrew Isom, and he had three petitions that got a lot of applause. One was calling for the students in the video to be expelled. One was calling for Superintendent Perry to be fired, and one was calling for the high school's executive principal William Behrle to be fired as well.
Isom: What I'm hearing, as a parent, as a member of South Colonie, is an epic failure of leadership, starting with this board, going down to the school superintendent, to the executive principal. This failure is so epic, I don't even have the words for this. People get fired for this stuff.
Ashley: And then at the end of the public hearing, as people were leaving, a chant of "Fire David Perry" broke out.
Crowd: Fire David Perry! Fire David Perry! Fire David Perry! Fire David Perry!
Dingman: And David Perry is the superintendent?
Ashley: Correct. And then more than one person mentioned that there's two school board members up for election in May, so if the energy continues through the school year, we could see some changes on the board potentially.
Dingman: So I have to say, Grant, hearing you talk about all this, we are hearing from community members who spoke last night saying the district has swept some very serious racist incidents under the rug, going back for some time here. Why do we think it took this particular incident for the whole issue to really come to the fore?
Ashley: I was curious about that leaving the meeting too. I put that question to Jasamine Shea. She's a former South Colonie student who spoke at the meeting, and her theory was that this story basically broke containment.
Shea: It went viral. It went viral. I've seen it go viral on national news. I have no problem talking and saying like, "Hey, I went to school in 2002. The same thing happened." Shows you that history is going to keep repeating itself until there's actual change. They keep saying, "We're going to do better," and I'm just sitting there laughing, going, "You're not going to do better." We're still in the same cycle here. It's literally the same people. The sequel keeps getting worse.
Shellow-Lavine: And then, what is the district actually saying that they're gonna do in response to all of the calls that you just went over?
Ashley: They've promised to improve, but they haven't made too many specific promises. Superintendent Perry said in a statement Sunday that investigations are ongoing and that "several students have received disciplinary consequences." Again, he said "disciplinary actions for individual students will not be shared publicly," right? Like we mentioned, there are some federal laws around that. And he says that the school is facilitating small group discussions at the high school level and that there would be a "increased presence" of Colonie police officers at the school. And before the meeting, Perry said in a prepared statement they were reviewing their practices and would take "concrete action."
Perry: Racism has no place in our schools, but those words must be backed by meaningful action. We have a responsibility to ensure that every student feels emotionally safe and physically safe, respected and supported in our schools.
Ashley: And school board president David Kiehle also told multiple speakers throughout the meeting something to the effect of, you know, "You raised this question. We'll have more on that soon." So we'll have to see if anything comes of that.
Dingman: And we'll have to have you back to tell us about it. That is WAMC's Capital Region Bureau Chief Grant Ashley. Thank you, Grant.
Ashley: Thank you.
