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A local family is fighting with officials at Edgewood High School over allegedly failing to stop racial harassment.
The family is asking for tuition money back, while school officials said they handled things appropriately.
Blake Broadnax spent two and a half years as a student at Edgewood High School, played on the basketball team and was active in school events. But he said that throughout that time, he was the victim of racially motivated harassment, which escalated into his junior year. Blake and his mother Rena told their story to News 3 from their new home in Indiana.
“I think the worst situation for me, out of everything that had happened, was in public speaking,” Blake Broadnax said. “I had asked a kid to edit my speech and he gave it back to me and crossed out my name, Blake Broadnax, and wrote ‘My little niglet.’ Then he wrote the n-word on the paper about 10 more times.”
Documents provided by Edgewood High School to the Broadnax family attorney detail the incident in March of last year. The student was pulled from classes, given an out of school suspension, required to apologize and put on disciplinary probation.
But Blake Broadnax said this was not the only incident. In November, he walked out of school after a student allegedly discussing rhyming vocabulary words told him that “trigger” and the n-word rhymed. Blake claims he’d been hearing the n-word every day for months.
“I expected racial things to happen so much that I would be relieved when it did happen because then I could go on with my day,” Blake Broadnax said.