Parents of students on a local high school basketball team are speaking out after one of the players was the target of racial slurs and a racially charged picture.
“They were, like, just making it not a big deal and saying that it, like, was making a joke out of it,” said KJ Horsley, a freshman on Clackamas High School’s basketball team.
The 14-year-old says two of his teammates made a picture of his face in a Google search for the n-word. He says this happened a month ago, when a friend discovered the conversation on Snapchat.
“I knew them since like third and fourth grade. I’ve, like, slept at their house and stuff. We’ve been friends for a while,” Horsley said of the teammates who did this.
His mother and other parents are furious at, what they say is, a lack of discipline by school officials.
Debbi Lamey, a mother of one of the basketball players, says she’s reached out to administrators to find out what actions school officials were going to take.
“Still no answers. The run around. The run around,” she said.
“There was no communication as far as what was happening, what the plan was, and we kept hearing from other parents that there was going to be a parent meeting,” said Jennica Baker, the mother of another player who has been called racial slurs.
Parents say there was no parent meeting and very little communication until Thursday, when parents of Clackamas High School basketball players received an email saying in part, “The situation was quickly investigated,” and “our district discipline policy was followed.”
Horsley says the two players were suspended from school for three days and haven’t been back on his team since it happened.
But on Thursday night, those two players were included in their team building exercise and, Horsley says, they will be back playing basketball next week.
“It doesn’t seem right that they just get to come back. And, like, cause everyone else we’ve grown tighter over the season and they’re just kinda, like, out of the loop. And we just don’t really want them back as a group,” he said.
Parents of Horsley’s teammates don’t think the punishment is enough, and they don’t feel he should have to play alongside the boys who called him racial slurs.
“If my ancestors, if they struggled to get through way more than I have, then I can probably handle this,” Horsley said.
Horsley tells FOX 12 he and other players are debating whether or not they’ll get back on the court if they have to play with those two boys.
School officials say they’re taking this incident very seriously and, as part of their restorative justice plan, are having the team participate in a service project. They say the situation indicates they have more work to do.
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