A woman hired to investigate racial harassment in a Utah school district says she experienced it herself

By Hannah Shoenbaum, Associated Press

A Black woman hired by a northern Utah school district to investigate racial harassment complaints the year after a 10-year-old Black student died by suicide says that she, too, experienced discrimination from district officials.

Joscelin Thomas, a former coordinator in the Davis School District’s equal opportunity office, alleges in a federal lawsuit that district staff treated her “as if she were stupid,” accused her of having a substandard work ethic and denied her training and mentorship opportunities that were offered to her white colleagues.

“From the beginning of her employment, Dr. Thomas was treated differently than her lighter-skinned and non-Black coworkers and was subject to a hostile work environment,” the complaint states.

Thomas was part of a wave of new hires in 2022 after the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the district in a settlement agreement to create an office tasked with investigating and addressing reports of racial harassment. The order stemmed from a 2021 federal investigation, which uncovered widespread racial harassment of Black and Asian American students in the district just north of Salt Lake City, including hundreds of documented uses of the N-word and other derogatory epithets over a five-year period.

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