When a Kentucky high school student was added to a group chat three years ago, students allegedly called her the n-word hundreds of times. Macie Hill received no support from school administrators when she complained about the racism, her family said, so in August 2020, they filed a lawsuit against Madison County’s board of education.
They had no idea how much change they would spur by speaking out.
The Department of Justice began investigating complaints from Hill and other students against the Madison County School District 20 months ago, ultimately finding that racism in the district was prevalent and that administrators failed to respond appropriately.
On Monday, the Justice Department announced that it had reached a settlement with the central Kentucky school district, just south of Lexington. To end the schools’ “hostile environment,” the department said, the district will change its discrimination policies and train and add employees to better identify instances of racism.
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“This agreement will create the institutional changes needed to keep Black and multi-racial students safe and to provide them with a supportive educational environment,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.
The Madison County School District said in a statement to The Washington Post that it will continue working with the Justice Department “to implement policy and procedure changes outlined in the agreement.”
Macie Hill’s mother, Susan, said reading the settlement agreement made her relive her daughters’ experiences in the school district. Macie and her older sister, Moriah, were frequently called the n-word by students at Madison Southern High School in Berea, Ky., and teachers and administrators didn’t discipline the perpetrators, according to the lawsuit the family filed in Madison Circuit Court.
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Once, Moriah asked a student to stop wearing a hat that featured the Confederate flag, the lawsuit claims, so he instead started wearing a Confederate flag sweatshirt. Administrators also prohibited Macie and Moriah from organizing an assembly for Black History Month in February 2020, the lawsuit alleges.
Share this articleShareWhen Macie received hundreds of n-word messages in May 2020, she cried in her father’s arms, Susan Hill said. Hill said that instance triggered the family to file the lawsuit against the board of education, administrators and individual students. The case is ongoing.
In the following months, Hill said, more families began sharing their experiences involving racism while they attended the school district. She was shocked when the Justice Department contacted her around October 2021.
“It just really made me say, ‘Hey, this is serious. This is really more than just a couple isolated cases. This is the environment of our school system, and it’s not okay,’” Hill said.
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The Justice Department said in its news release Monday that it found many incidents of students being called racial epithets, administrators failing to address harassment and intimidation directed at Black students, and Black students wrongfully being disciplined more than other students.
The school district will now update its reporting system for complaints and revise its anti-discrimination policies, including prohibiting the n-word and Confederate symbols that threaten other students. Under the agreement, the district also has to add three employees to oversee racial discrimination complaints and train staffers and students to identify and respond to racism.
While Macie and Moriah graduated high school in 2022 and 2020, respectively, Hill has another daughter who is a junior at Madison Southern High. She said that her older daughters lost self-esteem because of how they were treated, but that she’s optimistic other students, like her younger daughter, will have better experiences.
“We are definitely working towards that change,” Hill said. “And as a parent, that is definitely something that makes me rest a little easier at night.”
The Justice Department investigation in Kentucky is just one example of probes into racism within U.S. school districts. The department also reached settlement agreements with Vermont and Utah districts in recent years.
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