Dads sue over teens' expulsion for alleged racist texts
The fathers of two white Catholic high school students in Chicago filed a lawsuit on Monday over the teens’ expulsion for allegedly sending racist texts.
The suit, which does not name the students or their fathers, alleges that officials at Marist High School made an arbitrary and capricious decision to suspend the girls and violated school handbook polices on expulsion that amounted to a contractual promise. The suit also claims the school violated the teens’ privacy rights by allowing others to share the girls’ full names on Marist’s social media accounts. The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune and DNA Info have stories.
A lawyer for the families, Steven Glink, told the Tribune that another student somehow edited the texts to make them look more incriminating. “It’s a personal vendetta,” Glink said.
One of the alleged texts, captured in a screenshot posted to Twitter, said, “I f—— hate n——.” The alleged texts were exchanged following the fatal shooting of a black man by an off-duty police officer in the Chicago neighborhood where Marist High School is located. Protests followed the shooting by supporters of the Black Lives Matter and by advocates for police.
According to the suit, the alleged “racially insensitive” texts were sent after another student texted a screenshot of a tweet that claimed the Black Lives Matter group would bring street gang members to the school to kill all the whites. The communications were sent during a spiritual retreat where the students were encouraged to freely express themselves.
The suit claims the girls were “labeled as racists and used as scapegoats by Marist.”
The suit seeks the return of tuition paid during the more than three years the girls attended the high school, plus $1 million in damages.
