Park City School District repeatedly failed to adequately respond to student reports of racial, antisemitic and sexual harassment, according to a federal agreement the district entered into Wednesday.
The agreement comes after the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights began investigating the district last year. Since then, the office found evidence of over 180 reports of students harassing other students during the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years.
The investigation focused on three Park City schools: Ecker Hill Middle School, Treasure Mountain Junior High and Park City High School. The district took action to address some of the reports, the investigation found, such as disciplining certain students.
“However, the district’s responses to repeated harassment of Black, Asian, and Jewish students and to harassment based on sex — including slurs, threats, name-calling, gestures, symbols, and assaults, among other actions that negatively affected their access to education — did not meet the district’s federal civil rights obligations,” a news release stated.
The district’s Title IX coordinator — who is supposed to oversee sex-based harassment complaints — also failed to inform students of their right to submit formal complaints and failed to keep updated records of how the district responded to such complaints, the investigation found.
According to the agreement, the district must now report how it handles all harassment complaints to the Office for Civil Rights throughout the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 school years.
“Today’s agreement commits the Park City School District to fulfill its federal civil rights obligation to ensure that all of its students can learn without discriminatory harassment in its schools,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, in a Wednesday news release.
In a statement, Park City School District said it takes the investigation and agreement seriously. Officials pledged to begin “this important work” immediately and communicate plans with students, parents and staff.
“These incidents do not reflect the values of this community and the expectations of the schools or the school district,” the statement reads.
Racial, antisemitic harassment complaints
Of the more than 180 harassment reports that investigators discovered, 77 involved reports of racial harassment.
Students hurled racial slurs against Black and Asian students, including writing and using the N-word; calling Black students “monkey”; and calling Asian students “dog eater,” according to the report.
One Black student reported being racially harassed 17 times by at least 14 different students. The report noted that the district knew of the harassment because the student visited the school’s counseling office. One of the student’s parents also reported the harassment to the school. But when the Office for Civil Rights spoke with the parent, she said no one followed up with her about the report.
In some cases, the district disciplined students by contacting their parents, issuing lunch detentions and suspending them, but the Office for Civil Rights found the responses “proved ineffective because they failed to prevent harassment from recurring and the hostile environment based on race persisted.”
A staff member at one school who grew concerned about racial harassment emailed their administrators in November 2021, proposing an assembly to address the issue, investigators found.
“There’s been lots of reports of students using the N word,” the staffer wrote. “I think we should have some sort of assembly for hate speech and bullying. Explaining what the consequences are and that it’s not okay for them to use racial slurs.”
The school did not hold an assembly, the report stated.
Twenty-seven of the reports that investigators discovered involved antisemitic harassment, including students drawing swastikas, performing Nazi salutes and threatening Jewish students.
In one case, two students said antisemitic slurs to a Jewish student during class, and also threatened the student and Jewish people in general, the report states.
The district offered the Jewish student counseling services and disciplined the perpetrators, the report states, though it did not specify what that discipline was. But investigators found the discipline to be ineffective, because one of the students continued to antagonize the Jewish student and others until they were suspended.
Under the agreement signed Wednesday, the district must not only reiterate to parents and students that harassment of all kinds is prohibited, but also create plans to educate students and parents on how to report harassment.
Officials must also create new ways to track harassment reports and track how the district responds to them.
Sex-based harassment complaints
About 80 of the harassment reports that federal investigators found involved sex-based harassment.
That included students “touching or rubbing students’ thighs, hair, butts, breasts, and private parts”; attempting nonconsensual kissing; and threatening sexual assault, the report states.
Some students also called other students misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ slurs and joked in ways that denigrated gay and transgender people.
“Due to the District’s inconsistent recordkeeping, there may have been more incidents,” the report said.
In one case, a girl was surrounded by a group of boys, one of whom “pulled her shirt down to see her bra.” Though the district investigated the incident and disciplined one of the students, officials failed to provide evidence that it offered the girl supportive measures or explained how she could file a Title IX complaint, investigators found.
The district has agreed to train all of its employees on all Title IX policies — which protect people from sex-based discrimination — as well as ensure the district complies with those policies through its Title IX coordinator.
In response to the findings, the Office for Civil Rights said the district’s failure to follow federal policy “left children in school without effective responses” to repeated harassment.
Park City School District in its statement said officials are “wholeheartedly committed to creating and maintaining a safe and welcoming environment for all students free from harassment and discrimination.”
Read the full resolution letter and findings here.
