The elite Drew School in Pacific Heights has, according to a student and former faculty member there, offered an inadequate response and too little discipline following some disturbing incidents of racism documented on social media.
Laurel Bandy, a junior at the school and the president of the Black Student Union, has come forward telling ABC 7 that she's faced incidents of blatant racism at the predominantly white school. And several of the incidents she describes are shocking in their crudeness given this is 2019 in San Francisco, and not 1950 in Alabama.
Bandy says that fellow students do things like "saying the N word in the hall and on the bus," and she says, "There's this incident that happened, they're playing this game where like, you start off really quiet saying the N word and get louder and whoever bails out [loses]."
In another incident, a female student posted a photo of herself in blackface on Snapchat, captioning it "N-word [her name]."
Bandy's father is a San Francisco police officer, and following one incident in which his daughter was threatened on social media and subsequently in the school's halls, he filed a complaint with the SFPD. Bandy called out the school's racist culture in a video on the app TikTok recently, only to have her video screenshot by another student, reposted and captioned with the phrase "snitches get stitches."
The Drew School says that the students' behavior was "totally unacceptable" and tells the SFPD that "our administration took immediate corrective steps, both with the students involved and our school community as a whole."
But Bandy says the school simply staged an assembly to discuss racism, and at the last minute told her she wouldn't be allowed to address the school. It's unclear how any students involved were disciplined.
ABC 7 reports that Bandy is just one of 10 black students in a school of around 300 where tuition runs you around $50,000 a year.
Rae Contreras, who coached basketball at the Drew School for the past three years, tells ABC 7 that she quit her job there over the handling of the racist incidents. She calls Bandy "courageous" and says that she was disgusted by the school's refusal to suspend any students over the incidents over fears that it would impact their college applications.
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