A Chicago mother alleges in a lawsuit that her daughter’s public school system knew about repeated racist abuse and sexual misconduct that her child suffered at her elementary school and did nothing to stop it.
Sher’Ron Hinton says her now-13-year-old daughter was one of the only Black students in her grades when she attended Wildwood Elementary School on the northwest side of Chicago, which serves children in kindergarten through the eighth grade.
She was 10 when the abuse first started in 2022 during her fifth grade year, according to the lawsuit cited by local news outlets.
The complaint states that she was subjected to an “escalating campaign of race-based verbal, sexual, and physical harassment by Wildwood students,” and that the misconduct “was reported to, or actually known by Wildwood personnel.”
The child was allegedly body shamed, called the N-word, and told to harm herself in some instances.
The suit recounted an incident in November 2022 when she wrote “I feel like I’m going to die” on a classroom worksheet, prompting school staff to conduct a suicide ideation assessment. Later that month, she wrote “I want to die” on a different class exercise.
In December, a student hit and touched her inappropriately. The school implemented a safety plan after the incident, but never fully informed her mother, the suit states. Hinton was only told that her daughter would be under a daily check-in routine to ensure a “normal friend dynamic.”
Shortly after, Hinton’s daughter was allegedly struck again by a student who told her, “I’m always trying to kill you.” When the child informed staff, she was reprimanded for “always causing drama,” the complaint states.
Hinton met with school staffers who allegedly minimized the harassment to “friendship issues” and “exaggerations.”
The child also allegedly faced retaliation from her peers after she reported some students who had all received in-school suspensions for calling her the N-word in 2024.
Two physical education teachers are also named in the complaint. One is accused of rubbing his genitals against her back, and the other allegedly hit her with a clipboard or a rolled-up paper.
The lawsuit states that the harassment lasted two years, until the girl’s seventh grade year, and became so extreme that she had to be hospitalized after her mental health continued to deteriorate.
“She was subjected to extreme bullying by other students, including calling her fat, ugly, a whore [and], ‘why did you come to this school? I’m trying to kill you. You’re shaped like an egg, shaped like a football.’ And all of this was done because she was Black,” said Hinton’s attorney, Jamaal Buchanan, adding that the girl was the only Black student in her fifth grade through seventh grade classes.
A lengthy report from the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ Chicago cited Chicago Public School records that showed that Hinton’s daughter was the subject of relentless bullying from students, and how the administrators failed to quash it.
Documents reveal there were times the school didn’t notify Hinton about the misconduct, and either made her daughter sit down with her bullies or downplayed the severity of the bullying.
“My daughter didn’t just fall through the cracks, she was placed in them,” mother Sher’Ron Hinton said.
Earlier this year, Hinton’s daughter left school to undergo intensive mental health treatment after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I don’t know my feelings anymore,” the girl told the Sun-Times in March. “I’m not happy, but I’m not sad. I’m not depressed, but I’m not joyful. I don’t know what I am. Like, everything sucks.”
Chicago Public Schools, the Wildwood principal, the assistant principal, and the two PE teachers are named defendants in the suit.
The complaint seeks at least $50,000 in monetary damages as well as “systemic changes,” including a requirement that parents are informed whenever school staff conduct a suicide assessment and the establishment of a separate office to investigate reports of extreme bullying.
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