As a junior, Ebony Davis remembers a group of at Layton High students calling her the “N-word” one day after school.
When she reported them, a school administrator suggested the then-16-year-old organize a meeting and talk to the students herself, Davis told The Salt Lake Tribune.
“It was kind of a hard situation to deal with, because it was a friend of a friend,” Davis, who is multiracial, said. “I didn’t want to deal with the drama, so I chose not to discuss it.”
According to Davis, school administrators took no further action, and to her knowledge, the students were never spoken to.
She says that happened in 2022 — one year after a federal investigation found the Davis School District, where Layton High is located, had intentionally ignored “serious and widespread” racial harassment in its schools for years. The district later settled with the Department of Justice, agreeing to take specific actions to “address race discrimination in the district’s schools,” including the “racial harassment of Black and Asian-American students.”
But in the two years following the district’s promise to course correct, Ebony Davis said she repeatedly experienced racial harassment — particularly by her then-basketball coach.
Now a 19-year-old student at Weber State University, she is suing the district, alleging civil rights violations.
The lawsuit follows several other civil rights cases levied against the district. One, filed last January by former district employee Joscelin Thomas, accused the district of racially discriminating her after she had been hired to help investigate racial harassment complaints within the district. Thomas, a Black woman, later settled for an undisclosed amount, a district spokesperson said.
Another in 2019 drew national attention when the family of a biracial boy alleged that a school bus driver purposefully shut him into the bus’ doors, leaving him dangerously dangling outside as the vehicle lurched forward. The district ultimately settled that case, paying the family $62,500 and acknowledging the “racial assault.”
“Despite the Department of Justice’s findings, it was as if nothing had really changed,” attorneys for Ebony Davis argue in her recent lawsuit, filed in November. “The district disregarded the seriousness of the racist climate it had cultivated in its halls for years.”
Racial harassment a near-daily reality, lawsuit alleges
Ebony Davis decided to sue just six months after graduating from Layton High School.
Her lawsuit alleges that slurs and derogatory comments were a near-daily experience for her while attending school in the district that the DOJ previously found had a problem with “pervasive race-based harassment.”
Once, a student turned off the lights in her classroom and shouted, “Oh, where did Ebony go?,” the lawsuit states. It adds that students would also often touch her hair without her permission.
The racial harassment allegedly worsened after she joined the varsity girls’ basketball team her junior year.
Throughout her tenure on the team, her former coach, Robert Reisbeck, regularly made “racially charged and demeaning” comments toward her, the lawsuit alleges. Reisbeck, who is named as a defendant, could not be reached for comment. He previously served as the school’s athletic director and still teaches social studies there, according to the school’s website.
Ebony Davis recalls first getting to know her coach the summer before her junior year, when they competed at tournaments. She feels they initially connected because she played point guard, a position Reisbeck once played.
“I think that’s where he started becoming comfortable making those comments towards me,” Davis told The Tribune.
(Google Maps) Davis School District headquarters in Farmington in 2021.
During practices, when Reisbeck would ask the team to line up from tallest to shortest, he would commonly remark in front of Ebony Davis’ peers that her hair did not “count” toward her overall height, according to the lawsuit.
If the ball happened to hit Davis in the head, Reisbeck had said, “That doesn’t hurt her head, she has cushioning,” the lawsuit states.
Reisbeck also made comments to Davis that implied Black people “do not have money and are broke,” the lawsuit alleges.
During Black History Month, Reisbeck reportedly told Davis, “It’s your month, we have to treat you special,” and instructed other students to get her a drink, “because you’re special,” the lawsuit states.
More than once, the lawsuit alleges, Reisbeck called out during scrimmages, “Look, I put the only Black girl on the white team.”
“It made me feel uncomfortable,” Davis told The Tribune. “I didn’t understand why it had to be that way.”
By senior year, Davis said she became “extremely depressed,” and wanted to quit basketball.
“I loved basketball, I played it all my life, and he made it an uncomfortable experience for me,” she said.
Despite her passion for the sport, Davis said she could no longer endure the harassment. She resolved to let her grade point average slip below 2.0, so she would be forced off the team.
“So I didn’t have to quit formally,” Davis told The Tribune. “I was embarrassed by the fact that I was quitting.”
School failed to ‘immediately’ report allegations to district
An assistant coach, who is unnamed in the lawsuit, seemed to notice a change in Ebony Davis and her “discomfort” around Reisbeck, the complaint states.
The coach was aware of the repeated “racially charged remarks” Reisbeck had made toward Davis and reported the situation to an assistant principal, who is also unnamed in the lawsuit.
The assistant principal “deliberately” failed to immediately report the allegations to the district’s Office of Equal Opportunity, violating the district’s 2021 settlement agreement with the Department of Justice, the lawsuit alleges.
It took six weeks and an attorney — a friend of the assistant coach — for the school to relay the report to the Office of Equal Opportunity.
In the meantime, Davis’ GPA fell to a 1.98 and she was removed from the team. She never saw a game during her senior year.
“It felt liberating in a way, just to be done with that experience,” Davis said. “At the same time, I was disappointed with myself that my grades were slipping.”
The district investigated Reisbeck’s comments and ultimately determined in April that he had “intentionally engaged in racial harassment” toward Davis, according to the lawsuit.
A month later, Reisbeck received a written reprimand and was transferred to a different position, according to the lawsuit.
Constitutional rights should be ‘taken seriously,’ lawsuit states
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Former Davis School District student Ebony Davis speaks with The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday, Dec 3, 2024.
The lawsuit states that no student in the district would expect to go to class and participate in other programs and activities “while simultaneously being subjected to mocking, demeaning and humiliating verbal assaults on account of the student’s skin color.”
The racial harassment allegedly endured by Davis was “so severe,” the lawsuit argues, that she chose to abandon her education and her favorite sport.
“I will still have a very deep love for sports, just because I grew up with it, and I think it made me who I [am],“ Davis told The Tribune. She is currently studying sports nutrition at Weber State. But she feels the allegations outlined in the lawsuit hindered her college opportunities, including the chance to play basketball at the collegiate level.
She also suffered a damaged reputation, fear, anxiety, humiliation and a “loss of association,” the lawsuit states, referring to a person’s right to affiliate with a group and exercise their freedom of speech.
The lawsuit seeks a trial by jury and any damages or relief that the court “deems just and equitable.”
“It is time for the constitutional rights of Ms. Davis and other Black Students like her to be taken seriously,” the lawsuit states.
A spokesperson for the Davis School District said they do not comment on active litigation, but issued the following statement:
“Davis School District continues to prioritize safety and belonging as it is foundational to a child’s emotional and academic development. We stand firmly against any form of harassment or discrimination in our schools.”
“A single student experience with harassment is intolerable and contrary to our mission,” the statement continued, “and we take those reports seriously.”
What the district is doing to improve its racial climate
As part of its settlement with the DOJ, the Davis School District agreed to train all staff on identifying, investigating and addressing harassment complaints. The district also was required to educate students and parents on preventing discrimination.
While it’s made “structural progress,” students of color are still experiencing “ongoing and frequent” racial harassment in their day-to-day lives, according to a district report shared in July.
Roughly 71,000 students are enrolled in the Davis School District, and about 1% of them (or 710 students) are Black. During the 2023-24 school year, the district received more racial harassment complaints than there are Black students attending Davis schools.
About 83% of those 2,461 complaints were substantiated, according to the report. Of those, 570 cases were found to involve harassment, while the rest, though not classified as harassment, still violated the district’s discrimination policies.
The reported instances and consequential violations involved a total of 2,531 alleged student perpetrators. Of those, 341 were alleged to be repeat offenders, accounting for about 13% of the total.
“A point worth noting is that most students who violated the policy appear to correct their behavior and were not repeat offenders, which we attribute to our intervening measures,” the report states.
The district also received 57 reports of staff-on-student discrimination, 15 of which were substantiated. Over half of those substantiated cases met the definition of harassment.
Across all harassment reports, most involved derogatory language, according to the report. The most frequently used slur was the “N-word,” which was reported 863 times. About 85% of these involved elementary and middle school-aged children.
Anti-gay and gender-specific slurs were the second most common slurs, with 562 reports.
The report summed up the district’s second year of efforts to address racial harassment, discrimination and hostility in its schools by quoting a student who had participated in a focus group.
“The school has tried to do things to help, but they haven’t helped me,” the student said.
It concludes that two “seemingly conflicting” ideas can be true: The district may be making progress, while students of color continue to report experiences that contradict that progress.
“The gap observed between the observable progress made in the compliance aspect of this work and the lived experience in children will have the best opportunity to close when the transformation occurs at the cultural level of the institution,” the report concludes.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
