An investigation into the suicide of a black 10-year-old girl revealed that the Foxboro Elementary School in Farmington, Utah is ill equipped to handle cases of bullying.
Isabella “Izzy” Tichenor’s mom alleges her daughter was bullied because of her race and the fact that she was autistic, CNN reported.
However, the report stated there was no “direct evidence” that Izzy was bullied because of the reasons alleged.
During the course of the investigation, a three-person team found that classmates and teachers bullied Izzy and told her that she smelled and needed to take a bath and that these comments “could have been borne out of racial animus,” the New York Post reported.
The investigation team said they could not determine whether Izzy was targeted due to her race or disability because “issues relating to race, disability, and poverty sometimes intersect and when they do, can further complicate already challenging situations. It can be very difficult to extricate one from the others.”
The report also discovered the school created an atmosphere that allows bullying to go underreported, uninvestigated or unaddressed because school staff did not demonstrate “actual knowledge” of the Davis School District’s definition of bullying.
Just weeks before Izzy took her own life, the Department of Justice published a report showing that the Davis School District has a pattern of ignoring reports of “race-based harassment of Black and Asian-American students by district staff and other students.”