A Black woman hired by a northern Utah school district to investigate racial harassment complaints the year after a 10-year-old Black student died by suicide says that she, too, experienced discrimination from district officials.
Joscelin Thomas, a former coordinator in the Davis School District’s equal opportunity office, alleges in a federal lawsuit that district staff treated her “as if she were stupid,” accused her of having a substandard work ethic and denied her training and mentorship opportunities that were offered to her white colleagues.
“From the beginning of her employment, Dr. Thomas was treated differently than her lighter-skinned and non-Black coworkers and was subject to a hostile work environment,” the complaint states.
Thomas was part of a wave of new hires in 2022 after the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the district in a settlement agreement to create an office tasked with investigating and addressing reports of racial harassment. The order stemmed from a 2021 federal investigation, which uncovered widespread racial harassment of Black and Asian American students in the district just north of Salt Lake City, including hundreds of documented uses of the N-word and other derogatory epithets over a five-year period.
The civil rights probe found that Black students, who make up about 1% of the district’s 74,000 students, had been disciplined more harshly than their white peers for similar behavior. District officials admitted to federal investigators that years of discipline data demonstrated a trend of staff treating students of color differently than white students, but the district had done nothing to correct the disparities, federal investigators said.
Several Black students had also told investigators that their white peers referred to them as apes, made monkey noises at them in class and told them that their skin looked like dirt or feces. Inappropriate comments about slavery and lynching sometimes went unpunished, and Black…
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