Did a Kansas City charter school counselor call two students ‘big Black animals’?

Parents of two students attending Frontier School of Excellence high school are calling for administrators at the Kansas City charter school to fire a counselor accused of using racially offensive language directed at the teens.

The school’s college counselor denies using racist language. School officials say they know about the alleged incident, and the counselor was put on administrative leave, a common practice while the school investigates the claims. There have been no previous complaints made against the counselor, who’s worked at the school for six years, according to the officials.

Ultimately, the district needs to make the results of its investigation public and, if the students’ claims are true, the counselor should face appropriate disciplinary action. But that should just be the start. School leaders must treat this as a cultural issue and take action to provide more training to improve the way teachers, counselors and administrators interact with their students to ensure such incidents aren’t repeated.

Yes, there will always be bad apples in schools, on sports teams, in churches. But how we deal with chronic problems says everything about who we are. As the great African American writer James Baldwin said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

We don’t yet know what happened at Frontier, but racism keeps coming up with depressing regularity in area schools. Recent reports of bigoted incidents have surfaced at several area schools, including in Lee’s Summit, Independence, Kearney and Park Hill school districts in Missouri, and Olathe in Kansas.

Now Frontier may be adding its name to this dubious list.

The parents of the two 15-year-old boys, whom we are not identifying, said their sons were dancing on gym bleachers before classes started Tuesday. A school counselor, who is white, approached and allegedly told the boys to sit down because they were acting like “big Black animals.” The boys told their parents that the counselor repeated the comment when they asked what he’d said.

The teens, separately, immediately called their parents and begged them to come to the school. One parent said her son was “very upset.”

The counselor “denies the allegations made,” a school spokeswoman said in an email. “It is important to note that we take this subject very seriously and we will continue to conduct a thorough investigation.”

Based on school policy, the counselor could be terminated if he made the racist comment, said the spokeswoman, Jennifer Watson.

So of course this should be investigated thoroughly, and if true it’s hard to imagine how the counselor could keep his job. At the very least, talking to any student in this way is completely inappropriate. But calling young Black male students “animals’‘ is far worse — it’s downright disgusting.

Historically in this country, young Black men have been wrongly viewed and depicted as aggressive and violent. It’s an ugly stereotype that has too often led to bias, mistreatment and wrongful violence against them, including by police.

This is the kind of information that gets discussed during racial and cultural sensitivity training, which Frontier has done in the past and plans to do more this summer.

Even though the school says no other complaints have been made against the counselor, if it turns out that he’s calling young men animals, then how does he view other students of color at a school that is more than 90% Black and Hispanic? What other offensive language might have been used at other times that other students might have silently endured?

Diversity and inclusion training has been under attack by conservative legislators who wrongly claim education that helps teachers and counselors become more culturally competent, aware and sensitive is actually divisive. The opposite is true. It is exactly the kind of training that could help avoid unacceptable comments, such as those alleged at this charter public school.

Frontier School of Excellence is a small ninth- through 12th-grade school with nearly 200 students and a student-teacher ratio of 8-1 in each classroom. At a school that small, students are well aware of what goes on — who said what to whom, and what was done or not done about it.

How the district handles this incident, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, will affect all students and should be handled with all of them in mind.

This story was originally published June 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.