Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of racial incidents and quotations of racial slurs.
Anna Marie Young has kept a record of every time her children, who are biracial, faced racist comments or bullying in their West Ada district schools since 2022.
There was the time classmates called her 13-year-old son an “overgrown monkey,” and the time a student called her daughter a “thing” and an “animal.” Once, Young wrote, a student told her niece to go to the back of a line because she was Black. Young’s timeline, which she shared with the Idaho Statesman, lists nearly 20 incidents in which the kids experienced harassment.
She’s kept the record, she said, because she was concerned that the school district wasn’t adequately tracking the incidents, and because she has often felt that the concerns she raises to school officials are discounted or brushed aside as ordinary bullying.
“This is stuff that my kids are hearing,” she said. “And I feel like nobody thinks it’s happening.”