EVERETT — The parents of a gay, 13-year-old student who was allegedly bullied for more than a year, causing him to come home crying and eventually to leave school, have filed a $20 million claim against Everett Public Schools.
The Evergreen Middle School seventh grader was continually subject to homophobic slurs and twice beaten up in fights videotaped and uploaded onto an Instagram page devoted to brawls at the school, according to his parents, Nicole and Doug.
The Seattle Times is not using their full names so as not to identify their son, who's referenced by his initials in the tort clam and said he doesn't want to reveal his sexuality at his next school for fear of being bullied again.
Summing up that experience, he said: "I'm known in the school, and I'm gay, and that makes me an immediate target."
At first, sitting with his parents and their lawyer in his Everett home, the seventh grader said he was harassed only once in a while. But he later said it got so bad that "half the school" was calling after him in the hallways with insults. Talking about it, he started sobbing.
Nicole and Doug said their son was also sometimes subject to anti-Asian slurs. Their claim, a precursor to a lawsuit that gives the district 60 days to respond, holds the district and middle school responsible for what it alleges is a violation of Washington's anti-discrimination law.
"The school district has a duty to provide a safe learning environment," said Sim Osborn, the parents' lawyer, who has handled a number of high-profile, multimillion-dollar cases, including litigation over alleged excessive force by a King County sheriff's deputy, injuries at trampoline parks and harm caused by toys containing magnets.
"The district will actively investigate the administrative tort claim allegations," district spokesperson Kathy Reeves said in an email Wednesday, adding that officials had no other information to share because the claim had just been delivered.
The claim comes at a time of heightened tension nationwide around LGBTQ+ issues in education.
More young people than ever before identify as LGBTQ+: A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released in April found roughly a quarter of high school students surveyed around the country identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or "other/questioning," with bisexual representing the largest share.
Meanwhile, as the culture wars rage on, conservative lawmakers nationwide have sought to limit discussion of gender and sexual identity in schools, restrict the use of gender-affirming pronouns for transgender students without parents' permission, and ban transgender athletes from participating in girls and women's competitions.
In terms of the law, Washington has been a sanctuary from such backlash, said Katie Carter, CEO of the Seattle-based Pride Foundation. She pointed to a "shield law" legislators passed in April that protects those receiving or providing gender-affirming care, as well as abortion, from out-of-state legal action.
Still, local schools are not immune from homophobia.
Greg Stair, an Everett High School visual arts teacher and adviser to the school's gay-straight alliance, said he rarely hears about physical bullying. But students will tell him they often hear the word "gay" being used in a negative way. "Most of the time it's a student not understanding what they're saying."
That doesn't seem to be the case with the students assailing the 13-year-old, in his and his parents' telling of what happened. The kids used patently offensive slurs, in one instance referring to his sexuality and then demanding he get off the school bus. Nicole started driving him back and forth to school after that.
Then a group of girls who pursued the seventh grader most doggedly, according to the boy's parents, started provoking fights. The teen had initially been friends with the girls, who referred to him as their "gay friend," his parents said, but something caused a rift that turned their patronizing attitude into hostility.
The seventh grader said there were many other gay kids at school — including those belonging to a large "rainbow club" that existed until the faculty adviser left last year — who did not appear to be bullied. He was singled out, he speculated, because he was more "outgoing."
Videos of the fights are difficult to parse. The recordings capture the intensity of the moment and not what occurred before, and it's not always clear what's happening amid the melees.
While the seventh grader was taking a breather from being interviewed with his parents, his older sister identified key moments in the videos, including when her brother appeared to be on the ground, getting punched and kicked.
The December and May fights, both on school grounds, left the teen sore and bruised, his parents said. All the harassment has disturbed him so much that he takes medication to sleep.
The seventh grader's parents said they repeatedly called school and district administrators. At one meeting with the school's principal, Sarah Idle, Nicole said she broke down crying and pleaded, "Help me."
She and Doug said administrators took some steps, including moving a girl who was their son's particular nemesis to a different lunch period. But she and her friends showed up anyway to taunt him, Nicole and Doug said, and administrators failed to put a stop to it.
Their lawyer also pointed to the Instagram page of school fights as another reflection of administrators' ineffectiveness. "How do they not know about a website?" Osborn asked. "Or if they do know about it, why do they allow it to continue?"
Schools and parents around the country have wrestled with how to handle proliferating fight videos posted to social media. Vicki Olonzo, a spokesperson for the Auburn School District, said last summer she reported three Instagram accounts featuring fight videos from her district's schools to the social media platform, saying they violated rules against promoting violence. She said the accounts were hidden from the public while under review, but she isn't sure whether they were permanently removed.
Someone, too, recently appears to have taken down the Evergreen fight page that Nicole and Doug said showed videos of their son. A link forwarded by a spokesperson for Osborn no longer works, though Nicole said there's at least one other Evergreen fight page currently on Instagram. It does not have videos of her son.
Olonzo, of the Auburn district, noted that new fight pages pop up when others disappear.
In any case, the damage has been done, Nicole and Doug said.
After the May fight, they pulled their son from Evergreen. He had the option of going to an online school, but he didn't want to return to the kind of isolating experience he had during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. So his parents convinced school officials to allow him to leave early with the grades he had earned up to that point.
Asked what they hope to achieve from their tort claim, Nicole said she wants Evergreen and the involved kids to be held accountable. The claim cites seven students as involved parties or witnesses, using their initials, and references Evergreen and the district as the responsible entities.
Nicole also filed an Everett police report after the May fight. After interviewing students and reviewing video, an investigating officer determined "no racially or sexually biased language was used during the incident," Officer Ora Hamel wrote in a statement.
Police also concluded the matter was best handled by the school, consistent with a state law discouraging officers who work in schools from seeking criminal sanctions for students.
In the end, Nicole and Doug turned to the civil legal system.
While an eventual lawsuit might eventually seek changes in the way the district handles such matters, for now the claim is a financial one. Nicole and Doug said they're leaving that side of things to their lawyer, who contends the allegations are reflective of systemic problems — and on par with other claims that have garnered multimillion-dollar awards.
