A Black girl endured racist bullying in a mostly white Chicago school. Did CPS do enough?

A caution for readers: This story contains material that discusses suicide.

One afternoon in class last October, a student at Wildwood IB World Magnet School on the Northwest Side told his classmates he would say the N-word in exchange for gum. He said the word “over and over,” elementary school administrators later learned. Others repeated the word. The group of kids laughed.

Sitting among them was Jada, one of only two Black students in the seventh grade at the predominantly white public school. She reported that one of the kids said to her: “You’re a [N-word].” Some of the students later admitted this happened and served in-school suspensions.

Jada says this wasn’t the first time a classmate had called her that word. For more than two years, dating to when Jada was 10, she told school staff members that kids used racial slurs against her, body-shamed her, told her to kill herself and, in one case, touched her “in places I don’t want to be touched.”

Jada was found crying in the hallway and hiding in the bathroom. She told school employees four times in fifth grade that she was suicidal — one time writing she “wants to die” on a class worksheet.

The details of Jada’s school experience are found in school incident reports and emails from Jada’s educators. Her mother, Sher’Ron Hinton, was furious when Jada told her about the October incident and began digging for more information. After hiring a lawyer who submitted a public records request, she received hundreds of pages of documents, which she shared with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ. Jada is a pseudonym; we are withholding the student’s identity to protect her privacy.

Ultimately, Chicago Public Schools records show, Jada was found to have been the subject of incessant bullying, and the adults at Wildwood struggled and failed to extinguish it, leaving a vulnerable girl unprotected.

CPS acknowledged that schools were struggling to combat racist bullying and other discrimination four years ago by tasking its Office of Student Protections with handling those complaints. But even as the office has grown its staff, it has lacked the capacity to handle skyrocketing reports.

Parents often go to the advocacy group Raise Your Hand desperate for help getting CPS to take their concerns seriously, says its executive director, Natasha Erskine.

“We’ve helped parents [file complaints], and here, four or five, six months later, they hadn’t even received a response,” she says. “That really falls flat. … And it really does feel like a huge betrayal.”

Hinton says the school didn’t inform her every time Jada was bullied, as required by CPS policy and state law. In some instances, documents show staff brought Jada into conversations with kids who were bullying her or downplayed the severity of the bullying — actions banned under CPS policy.

Wildwood’s principal had been accused of mishandling racism a few years earlier, when she led Chicago’s top-ranked high school. She resigned that position in 2021 after only one school year.

CPS wouldn’t comment on specific bullying incidents involving Jada or allow the principal to be interviewed, citing student privacy laws and the mother’s threats to sue.

But when approached recently, Principal Melissa Resh, who started at Wildwood two months after Jada enrolled, told WBEZ and the Sun-Times that there are “many sides to every story.”

CPS officials defended the Wildwood administration’s handling of “incidents involving middle school students, including one student in particular.”

“In line with District policy, school leadership has consistently monitored and supported the students involved over the past two years,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement, noting that even complete school documents don’t capture everything about a school’s efforts or its communications with a family.

Some parents whose children were accused by Jada said their kids told them they were being falsely accused.

After months of on-and-off attendance, during which Jada says the bullying continued, the teenager left school this spring for intensive mental health treatment. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to her medical records. Hinton says she requested safety transfers for Jada and her four siblings from Wildwood to a new school in the fall.

“I don’t know my feelings anymore,” Jada said in an interview 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.”

A promising beginning

Hinton was excited when she won spots for her children at Wildwood three years ago.

Hinton’s younger sisters had gone to the school in its namesake neighborhood that a real estate agent calls a “suburban retreat in Chicago’s Northwest Side.”

The school sits in a quaint building nestled on a residential block next to a park. Its fundraising group raises about $80,000 annually to enhance school offerings. Schools like Wildwood are among the most sought after in CPS because they are high performing and parents often use their financial and social capital to bolster programs.

It’s also one of only 26 Chicago schools — out of 647 — that are majority white, according to CPS data. Wildwood has long had a small Black population. Today, there are only 20 Black children among its 517 students. Jada and her four younger siblings are five of them. Wildwood is also one of only 18 schools where less than 15% of students come from low-income families.

Hinton’s family has had financial challenges and at times lived doubled up with relatives.

The family now lives in a bungalow in a Northwest Side neighborhood about eight miles from school. Wildwood is a magnet school that can draw kids from across the city, but it also guarantees seats for neighborhood children, and two-thirds are from the community.

Despite the half-hour drive, Hinton, 31, thought her sisters had a good experience there and “wanted to get my kids in an environment that had a top-notch curriculum so that they can excel later on in life.”

But almost immediately after Jada started fifth grade, so did the problems.

In her first month, she reported that another student called her a “whore” and told her they “wish you never came to this school.”

“Why do I have to look at your face?” the classmate told Jada in September 2022, according to an incident report. A teacher found Jada crying after Spanish class.

“The first day, they were like, ‘You’re so ugly, you’re a whore and you’re a pig,’” Jada recalled in an interview this spring. “I didn’t know any of them.”

By October, Jada’s teacher called Hinton.

“Just noticing some friendship/behavior patterns with [Jada],” the teacher wrote about the conversation with Hinton, included in Jada’s records. “Almost every other day [Jada] is having a problem with someone. Did this happen at her previous school? Are there any strategies I should try here? I talk to her and have been doing check-ins.

“In conversation, mom was SO nice,” the teacher reported. “She said she’s seeing the same things at home. Jada talks to her all the time about this stuff. She doesn’t know how to handle her strong emotions and friendships.”

Hinton says Jada had friendship problems at her previous school, which serves mostly low-income students and is majority Latino. But there are no incident reports in Jada’s school records or any indication of mental health concerns.

‘I fear for my safety here’

Hinton knew Jada had been bullied and called names since 2022, emails between Hinton and Wildwood staff show. But the school’s emails often addressed Jada’s troubles in generalities, and Jada wasn’t sharing everything when she came home, her mom says.

Hinton also felt like the school was going out of its way for her. After Jada’s first year, Resh offered to take Hinton’s young twins into the full-day preschool program for free — a big deal for a working mother. Resh also arranged a discount for after-school care. Hinton was grateful, considered Resh a friend and joined the Local School Council.

The mother says she was stunned in December 2024 when she received Jada’s records and saw the extent of her daughter’s torment.

“Just imagine a [10-year-old] reporting to adults, telling them, ‘I fear for my safety here,’” Hinton says. “And then I don’t find out about all of this until she turns 13? I’m hurt. I’m heartbroken.”

A school social worker assessed Jada’s suicidal thoughts four times when she was in fifth grade, rating the risk as moderate or low, documents show.

Hinton says the school told her about only one of the four times Jada expressed suicidal thoughts. In Jada’s records, Hinton’s signature was missing from forms verifying parent guardian notification, though some documents included staff notes indicating they had contacted her and provided mental health resources.

CPS said it could not comment about Jada’s assessments, citing state and federal privacy laws. But officials said district policy does not require parent signatures on those forms.

Sitting on her couch this spring, Jada says she tried to tell her mom how bad things were. But she says staff often questioned whether “it’s just kid drama” — and her mom listened to them. Jada says she desperately wanted her mom to stand up for her.

“My mom was not doing anything, so I was like, ‘She must not care about me,’” she says.

Jada even wrote in a class assignment about fixing the world by ending bullying. Hearing this, a torrent of tears runs down Hinton’s cheek.

“All the signs were there, and I just missed the signs,” Hinton says. “This triggers me so bad.

“My daughter was mad at me,” Hinton adds. “Fifth and sixth grade, she was so mad at me. And I’m trying to figure out, ‘Why are you so mad at me?’ ”

Jada comforted her mom: “I’m OK. I’m OK.”

Trying to fit in

In many ways, Jada comes off as a typical young teenager. She loves to shop, even if she doesn’t have money to buy anything. When her mom gets upset about the bullying, the subdued girl sometimes rolls her eyes.

She once got in trouble at school for cursing in front of younger students, according to an incident report, and another time for emailing the school from her mom’s account to say she couldn’t participate in the mile run in gym class.

Her constant complaint to the school social worker is that she feels like she has few friends, documents show. In an email, Jada asks a teacher for parent email addresses so she can invite classmates to her birthday party.

That’s amid a sea of emails and incident reports about being taunted and called names such as “ugly, fat, bitch” and “mentally unstable.”

Jada and a friend even told an adult at Wildwood that they “fear for their safety” because another student was “touching and rubbing them on their legs and thighs.” He threatened to spread rumors if they told, the report said.

During sixth grade, a student messaged Jada’s friend using a CPS computer in school, writing, “go tell [Jada] to go and kill herself. … Go tell Jada that she is a [N-word].”

Jada’s friend told Wildwood’s assistant principal last November that she witnessed a lot of the racist bullying Jada endured.

The friend said students have called Jada a “fried chicken eater/muncher,” “watermelon eater” and “monkey,” according to a document in Jada’s records.

“I don’t think people care what [Jada] is feeling or that she has emotions at all,” Jada’s friend told the assistant principal. “It’s like they think they can say whatever they want and get away with it.

“I think kids feel invincible because we don’t have detentions at Wildwood and they aren’t scared,” she said. “People might be scared if these things went on their permanent records.”

Training — and consequences

Principal Resh and her staff knew Wildwood had a problem with racist bullying and tried to address it, documents show. But they also took some steps that didn’t align with CPS policies, and ultimately, their actions didn’t eliminate the racist bullying and slurs.

Jada’s school records include a February 2023 email from Wildwood’s social worker to Resh coordinating the setup of anti-bias training for students and potentially staff.

In April 2023, Resh, who is white, wrote to fifth graders that she was “deeply concerned about a rise in identity-based harm to students.” She said kids would face consequences as outlined in the Student Code of Conduct: a conference with parents, detention and possible in-school suspension.

“At the very least you will spend lunch with me reflecting on your words and actions and the harm you are causing,” Resh added.

Wildwood’s school improvement plan, approved the following fall, identified “bias-based” harm and bullying as problems and pinpointed the “need for more … systems and structures for addressing harm of all forms.”

The school also took specific steps to support Jada. Resh and teachers created safety plans for her, moved a classmate who was bullying Jada to another seat and set up regular check-ins to see how she was feeling, documents show.

Despite all those efforts, it appeared not all students got the message.

Last October, Resh told the LSC that “there has been an increase in swearing and racial slurs, particularly the ‘N’ word amongst students for even small things like stubbing their toe,” according to the meeting minutes. “[Resh said] parents try to explain that their child is not saying these things, but that the students are.”

Over the past three years, Wildwood’s staff investigated and confirmed 29 incidents of discrimination or harassment involving students, according to data released through a public records request. The students involved in the October incident received a day of in-school suspension.

“In speaking with students, we learned that there is a lot of knowledge that needs to be learned,” Kristin McKay, Wildwood’s director of social-emotional learning, wrote to Hinton in October. “[Jada] deserves to feel safe, respected, and dignified in her learning here at Wildwood.”

CPS, citing student privacy laws, didn’t divulge how or whether students insulting Jada were held accountable in the prior two years.

Carl Felton III, a policy analyst for EdTrust, an organization that works to remove racial and economic barriers in American education, says it can be uncomfortable for schools to navigate racist bullying when a principal is the same race as the parents who are in the majority and hold the balance of power in the school.

“Training means nothing if there’s no accountability,” he says. “It’s accountability for students and parents.

“Restorative practices can’t mean that students don’t face consequences for their actions. Students will only do what they can get away with,” says Felton, a former Baltimore city school district administrator.

CPS’ bullying policy tells educators not to “dismiss bullying as typical student behavior,” “solicit an apology” from one student to another or “use peace circles” that put a bully and a bullied student together.

Those strategies can help “only if used after other interventions have balanced the power differential between the perpetrator and target,” the policy says.

Jada’s mom says school staff sometimes told her they thought Jada was being dramatic or characterized interactions as “normal friend dynamics.”

And Wildwood administrators at times overstepped CPS policy, incident reports show.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of one accusation last September, McKay’s first move was to offer “a peace circle, if all parties agreed,” according to an incident report. McKay told [Jada] it was important to address the issue and keep her safe, but Jada told McKay “it’s okay, just drop it.”

And earlier this school year, a teacher twice asked Jada in front of another student whether “racially charged language” that was reported for investigation had in fact been used against her, according to school documents.

“[Jada] said no,” the teacher wrote in an email to Resh documenting Jada’s recanting.

“‘I said, ‘Oh wait, it didn’t happen?’” the teacher recalled in her email to the principal. “And she said ‘noooo’ nonchalantly.’”

Resh replied, “Thank you!” rather than instructing the teacher that confronting Jada in front of a student was inappropriate.

The CPS Office of Student Protections steps in

CPS expanded the purview of its Office of Student Protections in 2021 beyond student-on-student sexual misconduct to include reviewing reports of discrimination or harassment, including against a person’s race or nationality, as well as gender and disability. OSP would investigate the more serious incidents to help CPS leaders avoid missteps.

“Principals and administrators don’t have that expertise of how to interview, how to investigate, how to look at these cases,” William Klee, a former principal and now a district leader in the central office, said in an interview last month.

The number of cases involving a victim’s race or nationality nearly doubled to 621 from the 2022-23 school year to 2023-24, according to data received through a public records request. CPS says schools’ heightened awareness of their reporting responsibilities likely contributed to the increase.

Data shows a disproportionate number of reports — 16% — come from predominantly white schools, which make up less than 8% of all schools.

That includes cases at Wildwood.

But OSP only investigated a quarter of Wildwood’s reports in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, records show. Jada’s school records don’t show any evidence that her complaints were among those investigated by OSP. The school investigated the other cases.

It’s unclear why OSP wasn’t more involved.

CPS officials said Resh was handling the situation properly and took “documented actions, beyond formal reports, to support students and uphold District policies.”

CPS said OSP supports school administrators as they oversee their own investigations, and takes on cases from schools based on several factors, such as whether they are severe, repeated or complex. OSP started investigating more Wildwood cases this school year, records show.

That included additional complaints from Jada, who started opening up to her mom after Hinton learned more about what she had been going through.

But there was also an influx of cases from several families accusing Jada of wrongdoing. One said she stalked a student, another that she said something racist to a classmate, according to Hinton. Jada’s 5-year-old brother was also the subject of a complaint that he inappropriately touched a classmate in a bathroom. Hinton called those reports retaliation against her family for speaking up. Jada told McKay that a student under investigation by OSP called her a “snitch.”

By December 2024, officials instructed the Wildwood administration to pause inquiries into cases involving Jada, and Resh and her team said they needed help as tensions rose between Hinton and the school staff.

One Wildwood mother, who is white and asked to remain anonymous to protect her son’s identity, says her son was accused of wrongdoing by Jada three times, but he assures her that he has done nothing wrong, and she believes him — as well as other students.

The mother says racism is a societal problem. She credited Resh for confronting those issues head-on with programs to help students feel they belong and are accepted.

But she and other parents were highly critical of OSP’s involvement.

“It becomes this big, serious thing of outside investigators,” she says, worried that her son has been stressed.

Every year, OSP reviews 13,000 reports of alleged sexual misconduct, harassment or discrimination for potential investigation. The office instructs schools to handle thousands of cases that might have merit, but OSP’s eight investigators only take on about 560, CPS said in a statement.

OSP officials stress that investigations are only part of their response. They say their main focus is preventing incidents, helping schools address bias and delivering guidance and training.

“OSP and school-based teams prioritize the needs of students from the moment a report is made — ensuring impacted students receive immediate support services, even while investigations are ongoing,” CPS said in a statement. “CPS and school leaders remain unwavering in their commitment: every report will be taken seriously, every student will be treated with care and respect.”

But Erskine, the parent group leader, says victims often feel frustrated that their cases weren’t elevated.

“What’s being advertised by the district definitely does sound good and definitely wants to open your heart that parents know, ‘There’s a policy that I can go to that I can escalate if it’s not handled at the local level,’ ” Erskine says. “And so, when you go to the district offices and also see a slow to no response, it really does leave parents feeling pretty disillusioned.”

Racial trouble at Payton College Prep

Looking for information to help her daughter last fall, Hinton decided to research Resh. She had heard the principal had problems at a previous school.

She was shocked to learn that Resh had resigned from Walter Payton College Prep amid challenges trying to address alleged racism at the city’s top-performing public high school.

Resh arrived in the fall of 2020, when Payton was going through a racial reckoning: Black students said they were called the N-word and had bananas thrown at them, and Black student enrollment was falling.

Former Payton teacher Joshua Wiggins says before Resh took over, he and other teachers of color were working to put systems in place to support Black and Latino students.

“The feeling was that a lot of progress we had made was put on pause or stunted when Melissa came in,” Wiggins says now.

Near the end of that school year, McKay — Payton’s transformative justice coordinator, whom Resh later hired at Wildwood — announced she wouldn’t return in the fall.

A few weeks later, Resh followed her out the door, acknowledging that she had heard “the outcry of pain from our teachers.

“What I’m hearing is that I am a source of that pain,” Resh wrote in an email to the community. “I am eager to address that with humility, empathy, curiosity, and a focus on healing.”

Two 2021 workplace complaints against Resh seem to have languished at the district level, as did one from Resh against one colleague who filed against her.

In one case, a staff member accused Resh of positioning herself as a “[redacted] savior and tokenizing the [redacted] people with whom you work,” criticizing the white principal’s management of Black educators. Resh responded by filing a complaint of her own, accusing that staff member of using racially charged language against her.

The other complaint, five months later, was over a racially offensive image Resh allegedly sent a staff member.

Resh didn’t receive investigative results until last month — four years after the complaints were lodged and three weeks after WBEZ and the Sun-Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents related to complaints against Resh.

CPS wrote in letters to Resh dated May 9 of this year that it was “auditing” its system and realized it had not provided any follow-up information. The district said it found one allegation against her unsubstantiated and decided not to investigate the other.

CPS denied requests to interview Resh but noted that Payton struggled with racial issues before and after Resh’s tenure.

From Wildwood booster to outspoken critic

In her early days at Wildwood, Hinton sang the school’s praises to “anyone who would listen” and encouraged parents to send their kids.

When she heard about Jada facing trouble with her classmates in December 2022, Hinton offered to help Resh and other staff by talking to Jada’s class about the “very inappropriate and unacceptable” things being said to her daughter.

Another time, Hinton backed down from a complaint and thanked the school staff, telling a teacher, “I just want [Jada] to be great in all aspects of her life.”

But after two years of trying to fix the problems through the school and later learning the extent of the bullying, Hinton started blaming the administration. She spoke out at LSC meetings and on social media, has threatened a lawsuit and even called into a WBEZ show to talk directly to Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Some parents have responded by defending their children and school administrators. Some staff have rallied around the principal.

Hinton says she and her family have started to feel like outcasts, as others in the small school community look at them as troublemakers.

Even Resh’s defenders say Wildwood can be a tough environment for people outside the community.

A white mother, Abby Stayart, says she has been impressed with Resh’s efforts to bring in more families from outside the neighborhood and with the messages the principal sends about the importance of making sure everyone feels welcome. Stayart says she volunteers to feel part of the community.

Still, she and her two children have had trouble fitting in.

“I didn’t really realize how sort of left out we would feel because we didn’t live down the street from everybody else,” Stayart says. “Wildwood is the smallest, perhaps most judgmental place I’ve ever been.”

Help is available for people facing a mental health crisis. Dial 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline