A federal appeals court decided this week to allow Davina Ricketts, a former North Carolina high school student, to continue pursuing her racial discrimination lawsuit against the Wake County Public School System, its board of education, and numerous school officials. Ricketts alleges that school and district officials did not intervene and were “deliberately indifferent” to the racial harassment and cyberbullying she endured from other students during and after a student council election in 2016. The decision of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a trial judge’s order in 2022 dismissing Ricketts’ lawsuit and sent it back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Davina Ricketts says she faced constant and severe racial bullying after running for student council at William G. Enloe Magnet High School located in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Photos: Facebook and LinkedIn) Ricketts was a sophomore at Enloe High School in 2016 when she decided to run for student council “in hopes of remedying its lack of diversity,” noted Appeals Court Judge Roger Gregory in his opinion on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel. Instead, she “was met with racial harassment” and bullying from her peers, he wrote. That included being compared to a cockroach and having her name purposely left off the ballot, she claims. In her amended complaint filed in 2021, Rickett chronicles multiple instances of alleged discrimination against herself and three other Black classmates who ran for student council. The campaign posters and promotional bookbag tags of the four Black students were defaced, ripped, and thrown around the school building, she claims, while the campaign materials of white students were not. When election day came, Ricketts discovered her name and the names of the other three Black candidates were not on the junior class ballot. The omission was explained by school officials as a technical glitch with the election website and an inadvertent error by a student in charge of updating a Google doc listing the candidates’ names. But Ricketts told school officials it “looked like discrimination” to her. Her complaint says the school principal and other officials refused to talk to the Black students and their parents about their concerns and ultimately decided to hold a new election — including requalifying, campaigning, and making speeches — instead of simply correcting the ballot. This change “angered many students,” who “hurled accusations in the hallway” that “Black kids caused a reelection!” and other comments that made Ricketts feel physically threatened. The day after the election was postponed, a frustrated student allegedly made a bomb threat at Enloe, which Principal Scott Lyons dismissed as “a prank” and did not investigate, as was the case for a second bomb threat a couple of weeks later. The complaint notes that eight African-American students were arrested in 2013 “under Lyons’ watch” for a “real prank” involving water balloons. Other students immediately started cyberbullying Ricketts “by labeling her as ‘one of the angry Black girls,” the lawsuit says. Some Enloe students posted race-based, hostile comments on Twitter and elsewhere, including one that said: “Black students could not run for student council because their GPAs were too low.” Ricketts was the only one of the original four Black students in her class to run for election a second time. Her campaign materials were again destroyed, while white students’ materials remained intact. After the bomb threats, the cumulative harassment and hostile environment made her fearful to attend school, she claims. Her mother emailed school and district officials to complain that Black students were being targeted and harassed about the election and asked them to “address expectations of equality.” When they didn’t respond, she wrote another email to tell them, “You have a racial divide on your hands.” A local news outlet, ABC 11, ran a story about the student council election, including an interview with the mothers of Ricketts and another Black student, who was quoted saying “they believe the color of their children’s skin” led to the ballot exclusion, the judge noted. A torrent of racist and disparaging comments followed on the news outlet’s website, including comments that “Black kids’ dads were not in the picture,” “the administration covers for the mistakes of Black kids,” and “Black people were better off during segregation,” according to the complaint. A few days later, Ricketts’ parents received a letter from Lyons informing them that because she had accrued 15 days of absences, Ricketts did not qualify to participate in certain extra-curricular school activities, including the election. Only after her parents explained these were excused absences documented with medical notes was her right to participate in the election restored. Her lawsuit argues this treatment “varied from a white student at Enloe, who was allowed to remain on student council despite being suspended in 2016 and was also permitted to run for reelection in the same election as Ricketts, without issue.” During the reelection period, the April edition of the Enloe school newspaper was published and “was riddled with racial stereotypes and derogatory remarks toward minority students,” Gregory wrote, noting that multiple articles “parodied the events of the student election.” In one article, “a cockroach named Dee D. Roach from Southeast Raleigh, a predominantly Black district, “tells all,” and said their kind were “drastically underrepresented in student government,” announced their campaign for student council, and said they must get to work making their promotional bookbag tags, the judge observed. Elsewhere, the paper advertised “White History Month,” and the student council president expressed their need to “build a wall.” And Lyons, the principal, participated in an interview for a profile piece in which, while sporting a gold chain and tattoos, he described how he “coped” as a white man in Southeast Raleigh and how he “raps” about the ill-treatment he experienced as a minority. The complaint says that the school paper’s faculty editor, Trudy Price-O’Neil, “condoned the mostly Caucasian student writers’ articles with demeaning and racist language” and treated their content as “April fools jokes.” Ricketts, who says she was at the time of the election an “A” student, sought letters of academic reference from two teachers for a summer abroad medical program application. Both teachers refused, the complaint alleges. Ricketts did not win a seat on the student council when the election occurred a few weeks later in March of 2016. After the election, she says she continued to experience racial harassment at Enloe, which impacted her physical health and mental well-being. She had multiple incidents of fainting, one of which caused a concussion and subsequent “difficulties to engage in schoolwork and properly learn in class,” resulting in some of her grades dropping. “Ricketts continued to experience a hostile environment at Enloe until 2018, her graduation date,” Gregory wrote. Following the election, she was not selected for the new season for the varsity cheerleading team, though she had been on the team for two years. Upon graduation in 2018, Ricketts expected to receive an International Baccalaureate diploma “but was informed about ineligibility after submitting an essay previously reviewed, edited and approved by [her] IB teachers/advisors prior to submission,” Gregory wrote. She was told the essay was one point short of qualifying for her IB Diploma despite receiving passing grades in weighted courses. Her parents reached out to the international IB ombudsman, who initially reported they would investigate the matter but ended up ceasing all communications and referred her to Enloe. The high school “never provided any further reason for the outcome,” the judge noted. Ricketts filed her lawsuit in February of 2021 as a pro se litigant, representing herself. At the time, she was in college at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A trial judge dismissed her case in January of 2022 and denied her motion to amend her complaint, finding that many of her claims were “consistent with discrimination” but didn’t support “a reasonable inference that the decision makers were motivated by bias.” Regarding her claims of racial discrimination by students, school administrators and district officials, U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan wrote that “none of these alleged events, taken as true, rise individually or together to the level of Title VI [of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964] harassment to which defendant Board was deliberately indifferent.” In her appeal, Ricketts was represented on a pro bono basis by D.C. attorney Alex Siemers of Latham & Watkins, a global law firm with more than 3,000 attorneys. During oral arguments before the 4th Circuit appellate judges, Siemers noted that the district court had engaged in “nitpicking of particular allegations” in Ricketts’ complaint and argued, “We do have to step back and look at the whole picture.” “Put yourself in Davina’s shoes,” said Siemers. “If you’re being called an angry Black girl, if you’re being targeted by racially insensitive jokes, it’s reasonable to think that you’re being racially harassed. … So we think at the pleading stage Davina has done enough to clear that bar.” In its opinion, the 4th Circuit panel rejected most of the district court’s findings, ruling that “Ricketts has sufficiently alleged deliberate indifference, retaliation, and equal protection claims at this stage. Accordingly we reverse the judgment” [and] “direct the district court to allow Ricketts to amend her complaint, and remand for further proceedings.” The panel, which included Appellate Judge Pamela Harris and Senior U.S. District Judge John Gibney, wrote, “We now join our sister circuits and recognize the existence of Title VI claims for student-on-student racial harassment.” The judges agreed that Ricketts’ “allegations are sufficient to state a Title VI claim for deliberate indifference at this stage against the Board of Education. … First, Ricketts sufficiently alleged she suffered racial harassment that was so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it deprived her of equal access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by Enloe.” The incidents she reported “rise above simple acts of teasing and name-calling among school children,” Gregory wrote. “Second, Ricketts sufficiently alleged Enloe administrators had authority to address the alleged harassment and to institute corrective measures, and had actual notice or knowledge of the alleged harassment,” he noted. “Third, Ricketts sufficiently alleged Enloe administrators acted with deliberate indifference to the alleged harassment. Ricketts alleged Enloe administrators: (1) refused to meet about the ballot exclusion; (2) were aware her campaign materials were being destroyed but did nothing to stop it from happening; (3) made no attempt to address the harassment she endured before, during, and after the elections; and (4) merely advised Ricketts to ‘come see’ an administrator to discuss the issue of harassment,” the opinion continued. “While Enloe administrators were not entirely unresponsive and ultimately corrected the ballot exclusion by way of announcing a new election, they nonetheless failed to engage in efforts that were reasonably calculated to end the student-on-student harassment that occurred before and after the elections. From the allegations in the proposed amended complaint, it can be inferred that the sum total of the Enloe administration’s response to reports of racial harassment was to invite Ricketts — the victim — to ‘come see’ them to discuss the issue,” Gregory wrote. Regarding Ricketts’ Title VI retaliation claim, the 4th Circuit panel found that Ricketts was engaging in a protected activity by “opposing ballot exclusion based on discrimination” and “sufficiently alleged that the school took materially adverse action against her” in the form of the letter from Lyons prohibiting her from the election. “To be actionable, retaliatory conduct need only be enough to ‘dissuade a reasonable person from making’ a charge of discrimination. … We think a reasonable school student in Ricketts’ shoes — faced with a letter to exclude her from the election at the heart of the controversy — might well be dissuaded from lodging any further complaints, regardless of the outcome,” the opinion states. The judges upheld Ricketts’ claim that her equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment were violated by eight individual school faculty and administrators involved in the events around the student election, finding that she sufficiently alleged all three needed elements: discriminatory peer harassment, deliberate indifference, and discriminatory intent. They also ruled that her allegations were sufficient to state an equal protection claim against the Board of Education, which was “deliberately indifferent” to her claims of discrimination. In a footnote, the opinion noted that the district court did not address the individual defendants’ qualified immunity claims and left “resolution of this issue to the district court as the case goes forward.” Ricketts, who is now a clinical researcher in Philadelphia, told Atlanta Black Star via email, “I’m thrilled with the Fourth Circuit’s decision, and I look forward to proving my case in the district court.” Siemers said, in an emailed statement, “We appreciate the Court’s decision in this case, particularly its recognition of Title VI and Equal Protection claims for student-on-student racial harassment. With this decision, our client’s allegations of racial harassment have rightly been recognized as sufficient, and she can now continue to pursue her claims.” ‘Better Off During Segregation’: Black North Carolina Teens Called Cockroaches In School Newspaper Faced More Racist Attacks from Adults After Local Broadcast Aired Their Experience, Lawuit Says