Los Angeles Unified's school board voted unanimously to pass a resolution addressing hate speech in schools, after Black teachers testified that students routinely hurl racist insults at them, with the N-word at the top of the list. One educator says the slur has appeared scrawled on her classroom wall for five consecutive years. Another reported receiving a racist message straight to her inbox.
The resolution, as described by the Los Angeles Times, calls for heightened student counseling tied to the N-word and other hate speech, along with staff training on how to respond to and report such incidents. District staff must report back to the board in March on what progress has been made. The newspaper notes that the measure mainly addresses harm done to students, with comparatively little said about the educators who brought the complaints forward in the first place.
Those complaints piled up at a public forum in July, where the Rev. James Thomas read aloud teacher accounts of racist incidents, according to the same report. One teacher said three male students called her racist slurs during nutrition break. Another said a racial slur had been written on her desk while a student shouted it three times, and that an administrator was unwilling to take action once she reported it.
Slurs, Suspensions, and a Principal Who Sent a Student Back to Class
In one of the starkest accounts described at the forum, a student reportedly shouted a racial slur at a teacher four times. The teacher issued a two-day suspension, but the principal returned the student to the classroom without any consequences, according to the forum account relayed by the Times. LAUSD's student population is roughly 7% Black, the paper reports, a demographic backdrop against which advocates say the slurs keep surfacing.
Shelly Castillo told the paper that Black students have reported being called the N-word, a monkey, and other degrading names. She said many students simply stop reporting the abuse because they haven't been believed, and because speaking up has made them targets or left them isolated. Teachers and advocates separately reported that complaints often draw no response at all, and that some teachers who do complain face reprimands or retaliation — write-ups, or being handed worse class assignments.
Bruce Gerard Brown Jr., who teaches multiple subjects at San Fernando High School, said plainly that the N-word is a slur, not merely a bad word. Denisha Jordan recounted experiencing racism herself, including the N-word, both as a child and later as a teacher — and said her own daughter has also experienced racism at school, including hearing a racist joke in class.
Board Members Push Back on 'Not Enough'
Kelly Gonez, one of three board members who brought the resolution forward alongside Karla Griego and Sherlett Hendy Newbill, said she had spent more than a year talking with Black educators in her board district and came away convinced the district needed to do more. She said existing policies and protections, while strong on paper, had proven insufficient in practice.
Newbill, the board's only Black member, said incidents require a response, policy violations require accountability, and identified problems require follow-through, per the Times account. Griego said students should be educated about the implications and harm of using the N-word and other racial slurs, while fellow board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin proposed family workshops to explain why the term is treated as hate speech at school.
The resolution leans on the district's restorative-justice discipline approach, a policy aimed at virtually eliminating suspensions districtwide. Restorative justice aims to teach students why their actions were wrong and, ideally, have them make amends, meaning students don't necessarily face outright punishment. The Times reports the resolution does not open the door to new punitive actions against students — a distinction that matters given that school students have more limited free-speech rights than adults, even though schools retain broad power to address bullying and impose discipline.
Advocates Call for a Formal Investigation
A coalition of groups — the Black Educator Advocates Network, Community Coalition, Watts of Power Foundation, and Black Teacher Project — wrote in support of the resolution, arguing that Black teachers and students deserve respectful, dignified, and safe learning environments, according to the Times.
Separately, the Black Educator Advocates Network and the NAACP San Fernando Valley Branch are pushing further. As reported by the Los Angeles Wave Newspaper Group, the two groups are calling for an independent investigation into what they describe as a longstanding pattern of racial harassment and retaliation against Black educators, with documentation reportedly dating back to at least 2020. The Wave's report states that educators who reported incidents often faced retaliation from school administrators rather than support.
In a press statement, the Black Educator Advocates Network detailed what that retaliation has allegedly looked like: weaponized performance evaluations, involuntary transfers, stripped responsibilities, and deliberate professional isolation. Current law requires school districts to document and report hate-motivated incidents and crimes involving protected characteristics.
How Other Districts and the City Have Responded
LAUSD isn't the only Southern California district overhauling its approach. Santa Barbara Unified recently built a districtwide protocol for responding to racial incidents that assigns a response team, rather than a single administrator, to follow a set timeline from initial response through investigation, repair, and ongoing support, according to The Santa Barbara Independent. Under that district's discipline matrix, a targeted racial slur or a racist social media post counts as a level-three offense, triggering an investigation, immediate contact with families, a mandatory racial justice program, and suspension. The Independent also reports that certificated staff of color in that district grew from 35% of the workforce in 2023 to 38% this year.
The Los Angeles City Council took its own, more blunt-force approach last year: in July 2025, it banned use of the N-word and the vulgarity known as the C-word during public comment, the Times notes.
This isn't the first time the LAUSD board has taken up a resolution targeting hate speech. In July 2021, the board unanimously approved a resolution affirming the value of Jewish students, families, and employees, according to a Los Angeles Unified School District announcement at the time. That measure called for updated curriculum to increase understanding of Jewish peoples and reduce anti-Jewish hate, along with enhanced training for reporting and responding to hate-speech incidents and crimes — a template of sorts for the staff-training and reporting provisions now built into this year's resolution.
