St. Cloud Tech High School ninth grader Hodo Nour talks about Snapchat and Facebook posts made about her that implied she is affiliated with the ISIS terrorist organization.
School officials in St. Cloud said Thursday they are responding to the concerns of St. Cloud Technical High School students who walked out of classes Wednesday to protest discrimination against Somali students.
District officials said staff have been meeting in small groups with students and parents. The school’s principal, Adam Holm, also addressed the student body Thursday.
The walkout Wednesday followed a posting on Snapchat that showed a Somali student in a wheelchair. A caption on the photo suggested she belonged to ISIS, the Iraq-based terror group.
“Yesterday, during lunch, I had someone take a picture of me, and write a comment saying ‘Disabled ISIS’ on it,” Hodo Nour, a young woman speaking outside Tech High School in a video posted on YouTube. “It was not asked for. Nobody asked to take a picture of me. It’s very rude. And when the guy was confronted, he played it off like he didn’t do anything at all.”
Other video footage of the protest showed students complaining of repeated insults based on their faith and race, telling school officials that they didn’t feel they were being protected or heard when they complained of their treatment by fellow students.
St. Cloud Technical High School students gather outside the school Wednesday. More than 100 students and a few parents protested racially charged social media posts and other incidents. Dave Schwarz | St. Cloud Times via AP
Tami DeLand, a district spokesperson, said that the protest prompted school officials to put Tech High School in “containment” briefly on Wednesday. She said it involved enhanced security, but that classes continued during the containment.
She also said that school officials are addressing students’ concerns. DeLand said that the district has a strong policy for dealing with bullying among students, and that the policy might apply in this case.
“It’s very clear-cut that the administration takes this seriously,” DeLand said. “There is a systematic way, a procedure to go through, to do this, and that’s how this will be handled and it’s how all incidents like this will be handled.”
Abdul Kulane, a Somali community leader and one-time St. Cloud City Council candidate, said district officials didn’t have an immediate plan of action when he met with them Thursday, but that he hoped they would have a better response by next week.
“We want the students to be welcome in the school district… and we want this to happen to all the students, regardless of where they are from, their religion, regardless of how they appear and dress,” Kulane said in an interview on MPR News. “Students are feeling that they do not belong to the school when they are bullied, and they were mocked and they were harassed on social media.”
The district also put St. Cloud’s Apollo High School in “containment” today, in response to the incident at Tech High. Both schools have about 1,400 students. The district has about a 40 percent minority student population.
The Minnesota Department of Education said it was reaching out to the St. Cloud district “to see what resources we can offer to ensure this is propertly addressed,” said department spokesperson Josh Collins.
Source: http://www.mprnews.org/
