Two New Mexico high school students have been suspended after they posted a photoshopped image on Snapchat that the principal called “repugnant and hateful.”
The photo shows a lone black student surrounded by others wearing KKK hoods. The image got posted on Tuesday to the school’s Snapchat group where students saw it and then reported it to the school administrators.
“It was awful,” Mary Morrow-Webb, the mother of the student in the picture said. “It was frightening. I just really got sick to my stomach. I was afraid for my daughters and for the other children there that are at risk for these types of threats.”
“You don’t expect your kids going to school and having to deal with racism and discrimination in 2017,” stated Lamont Webb, the girl’s father. “It’s kind of appalling.”
The two students who posted the image have both been suspended for 10 days and one of them has been kicked off the football team. They claim the photo was supposed to be a joke.
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According to Webb, his daughter and her sisters who go to the same school have not returned to class since the image was posted online.
“And now they say they can’t go back,” Morrow-Webb said. “And we can’t afford to send our daughters to private school, so what options do they have? They finally have broken my girls. So what do we do?”
They say that they have been reporting incidents of racism and bullying for three years and the school has not taken any action.
“We’ve been coming in with complaints of my daughter saying someone called her the N-word,” Webb said. “Someone called her a porch monkey and different things like that on a regular basis.”
Albuquerque Public Schools said the picture was totally unacceptable.
“We took this to our police department,” APS Superintendent Raquel Reedy said. “They came and investigated and are really looking very carefully at whether we should file charges for hate crimes. This is something we’re looking at very carefully because it’s this serious.”
The school has a new principal says Reedy.
“The fact is that she is out to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Reedy said. “She is adamant that the school is going to be safe for every single student that attends, and I would encourage any parent who has any concerns to contact Ms. Bannerman because she will look into it and they would be heard.”