Marist students face disciplinary action after ‘racially charged post’

Administrators at Marist High School in Mount Greenwood on Monday promised swift disciplinary action against students whose private, racially charged text message chain was publicized on social media over the weekend.

The students, all senior girls, were discussing the impact that Saturday’s police shooting of a black man in Mount Greenwood — and the resulting Black Lives Matters protests — would have on classes in the coming week. One of them used profanity and the N-word, according to a screen shot shared widely on Twitter.

At least four other girls reaffirmed the racist message, screen shots indicate. No one appeared to push back on the comment, although one girl, who students familiar with the incident said is black, proceeded to leave the group message. Her departure was met with laughter, screen shots show.

Marist administrators said Monday they were “devastated” by the incident, which they learned of Sunday evening after a Twitter user posted a screen shot of the text messages and tagged the school’s account to alert them.

“It’s so contrary to everything that we say that we’re about,” Brother Hank Hammer, the school’s president, said. “We talk about the kids being brothers and sisters for life, and this is not the way that brothers and sisters treat each other.”

The Catholic school’s top brass called an emergency meeting Sunday night to discuss the matter and then sent out automated calls to faculty and parents to inform them of the situation. Administrators also placed individual calls to the parents of the girls who sent the inflammatory text messages.

Just after 10 p.m., the school posted a statement addressing the racially charged texts on its website and its principal tweeted a link to the statement from his personal account.

“This evening Marist High School was made aware of a racially charged post on social media involving Marist students,” the statement reads. “We are devastated by this situation. Disciplinary action is being taken.”

Marist Principal Larry Tucker declined to say what punishment the girls involved would receive nor would he say how the school would determine which of the girls on the text chain would be disciplined.

“We feel like we know those who are involved,” he said.

The girls’ text exchange occurred against the backdrop of heightened racial tensions in the predominantly white Mount Greenwood community following the fatal police shooting of a black man in the 3100 block of West 111th Street over the weekend.

Joshua Beal, 25, of Indianapolis, was shot to death Saturday after a road rage incident escalated into a physical altercation with an off-duty police officer. Police said Beal was shot after failing to drop a gun when confronted by officers.

When about 15 protesters against police brutality returned to the Mount Greenwood neighborhood on Sunday, they were met by hundreds of so-called Blue Lives Matter demonstrators and Mount Greenwood residents who yelled racial epithets and held incendiary signs, including one that read, “You are animals, #gohome.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday condemned the counter-protesters for their “ethnically tinged language” and said there was no place for it in the city of Chicago.

“You can make your views known without it spilling over to anywhere that in any way demonizes anybody for their race, their ethnicity or their culture,” Emanuel said. “That is unacceptable.”

Marist students were off Monday due to a faculty in-service day, but dozens of students flocked to the school at the behest of administrators to discuss the text exchange.

“They were hurt to think that this would go on in their school — and that came from both white kids and black kids,” Hammer said. “I think all the kids there were just devastated … like, ‘Wow, this is going on in our school.'”

Administrators said the racially mixed group of 40 or so students who met with administrators Monday, most of whom are members of a recently-formed Peace and Unity group, were honest in their assessment of the racial issues at the school.

“We have to hear their perspective, how they see it,” Hammer said. “Because it’s not maybe the way we see it, but we have to understand how do they see it. I think that’s very important if we’re going to be educators. We have to listen to these kids and talk about their experiences and their realities.”

Tucker said students threw out a variety of ideas for dealing with the racial issues that exist at the school, but that his main takeaway was that continued education about race and racial dynamics was necessary.

He said he wants to ensure that this incident “isn’t just a one event type of thing and then it ends,” but rather that it sparks a prolonged discussion that evolves as the school moves forward.

Marist students of color who attended Monday’s meeting with administrators agreed that the issue of race needs to be addressed in more than a perfunctory or one-off manner, but expressed skepticism that administrators were serious about making the school, which is 12 percent black, a more welcoming place for minorities.

“Some of the faculty members are only looking at this as — ‘Our school has been damaged. We have to fix that’ — the reputation of the school, not fixing the actual issues at the school,” said a senior who identifies as multiracial.

“Without all this publicity, the school wouldn’t be taking any sort of interest in this action,” he continued. “It would just have been another one of those things that gets swept under the rug and forgotten, because as minorities our issues are trivial in the eyes of the entire school.”

Patrick Ryan, a Marist counselor who minority students identified as an advocate for them within the school, said he believes there are faculty members who are serious about improving the experiences of marginalized students at the school.

“I’ve been here for nine years,” said Ryan, who wants Marist to be seen as a “safe place” for all students, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation. “I’m a bleeding liberal who believes in social justice and I haven’t left this place because it’s a good community.”

A senior who is black said that while she has been called racial epithets before and during her time at Marist, she was shocked and hurt that the girls whose text messages were publicized, some of whom had been longtime friends of hers, would say such things.

“I’ve known some of those girls since grammar school, so they have no excuse,” she said. “It’s not like they don’t have any experience, that they’re not around black people. They are, and they knew it. They knew better.”

The student said she’d never heard the girls implicated in the group text chain — some of whom had been to her home for sleepovers and whose parents were friendly with her parents — espouse racist beliefs in the past.

She said she feels like their relationships have been irreparably harmed by the texts and doesn’t plan to reach out to any of the girls about the messages.

“It’s past that point, you showed me your true colors,” the student said. “When you think of a black person, you should remember me, your friend, and not ever want to say something like that or think something like that.”

School administrators said they would begin the day Tuesday with a faculty meeting addressing the issue and are hoping to bring the student body together with a school-wide assembly later in the day to re-instill “what we stand for at Marist High School.”

“This is an education-able moment for the whole community,” Tucker said. “It doesn’t stop, it continues to go on and I think that becomes a reaffirmation of what it means to be Marist, what it means to be a Catholic school.”

He said the school had been in touch with several “professionals” it hopes will be able to help the school move forward and that administrators intend to involve student leaders in the process of bridging whatever racial issues exist at the school.

zkoeske@tribpub.com

Twitter @ZakKoeske