Tara Blunt remembers picking up her youngest son from elementary school. He loved learning and making friends with everyone he could.
Over time, she said, she watched that change because of racial harassment and bullying he experienced as one of the few Black students in Falls City, Nebraska.
“The short distance he had to walk from the school doors to my car, you could watch him walking to the car and (emotions) building up, crying,” Blunt said. “When he got to the car, it was like he was just releasing it.”
When Blunt picked up her son on an October 2022 day, she had no idea that another student had shoved the fourth-grader to the ground and stomped on his head. A school report reviewed by The Midwest Newsroom confirms the incident.
She recalled him complaining of a headache, but didn’t find out what happened until eight months later when she requested records from the school. It’s just one incident Blunt outlined in a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.
“It was hostile for him every day at school,” Blunt said. “Every day he went to school, it was his nightmare. I don’t think that he got one day of school without being called something or something commented to him.”
The Midwest Newsroom is not naming the 12-year-old boy because of his age and because he is an assault victim.
School records show the assistant principal at the time, Wendy Craig, called Blunt about a fellow student stomping on her son’s head, but Blunt said she never received a call from Craig. There were also no records of her son being taken to the school nurse.
Blunt said it was a constant challenge trying to get school officials to help her son with the racist bullying. Blunt filed an official complaint with the U.S. Department of Education in 2023, and on April 21, she sued the department for taking too long to investigate her claim. Her lawsuit came weeks after the Trump administration gutted the office in the DOE that handles civil rights complaints.
Their story isn’t unique in rural communities, where people of color are often in the minority.
Falls City is no exception. It sits in the southeast corner of Nebraska, about halfway between Omaha and Kansas City, Mo. Of the 4,100 residents, less than 1% are Black, according to 2020 census data. About 90% of the population is white.
Tim Heckenlively, Falls City Public Schools superintendent, declined to answer questions about the head injury incident or questions about how the district handles incidents of bullying or racism.
Blunt said there were always little comments when her son started at the school as a kindergartner, but the issues got worse when he entered his second semester of third grade in 2022. According to the complaint and Blunt, students called her son a “monkey,” “cotton picker” and the N-word.
Blunt, who identifies as white and Native American, recalled a day when her son was wearing a bracelet with the school mascot name, “Tiger.” Another student told her son he should change the bracelet’s “T” to an “N,” according to the complaint and school records.
Blunt said Falls City Public Schools officials and teachers failed to discipline her son’s bullies, and would continually brush off her concerns about the racist name-calling. Teachers would ignore or dismiss the reports, and tell Blunt’s son he was “tattling,” Blunt said.
The school principal and assistant principal at the time would say the other kids didn’t know their words were racist, or school officials thought there was no racism going on, according to the complaint. Another instance in the complaint said that Craig, the assistant principal, brushed the racial harassment off as “boys being boys.”
“To me, that sounded wrong in itself because you’re a principal. You’ve been in school for 20-plus years,” Blunt said. “You mean to tell me you don’t know what racism is? You don’t know how to catch it. You don’t know how to work with it or stop it or take any steps to make sure it doesn’t escalate?”
The Midwest Newsroom reviewed emails between Blunt and various school officials, including the superintendent, principal and assistant principal. Following several incidents at recess, school leaders separated Blunt’s son from another student who was bullying him. In another instance, Blunt’s son “made faces” at a group of boys after he felt they were teasing him.
“I’ve always told him, if you’re honest with me, I can help you. Even if you did something wrong, if you’re honest with me, we can make this work or fix it,” Blunt said. “He’s called people names, and he’s come straight home and said, ‘Mom, I said this,’ and he ended up (running) lines. His phone was taken, his video game was taken, but he knew that if he told me the truth, that I would still handle what the other child did, too, whether it meant call their parents, call the school.”
Officials also met with Blunt near the end of the 2023 school year, but following those meetings and more back-and-forth communication, Blunt said the school told her they wouldn’t discuss her concerns anymore, so she decided to pull him out of Falls City Public Schools.
Lingering issues
Blunt said her son still deals with headaches, along with emotional trauma.
“I watched my son’s happiness be sucked from him,” Blunt said. “As a child, these are supposed to be the best years of their life. My son’s coming home, crying every day, hurt every day.”
In the federal complaint, Blunt said she wants the school to implement diversity training for teachers and students, along with creating procedures to address racial harassment.
Falls City Public Schools used to have a program, called Second Step, meant to help kids understand discrimination and racism. The program was taught in one of the elementary schools starting in 2017. It was introduced to the middle school in 2021, which is when several parents — including a few whose children harassed Blunt’s son, Blunt said — spoke against the program, and the school board ultimately suspended it.
“I felt that the Second Step was going to help these children understand things that aren’t right here in front of our faces every day,” Blunt said. “A lot of diversity is not here.”
Blunt initially submitted a complaint to the Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) in April 2023. Within a week officials told her the case was closed because it had been handled at the school level.
At the time, Heckenlively, the Falls City superintendent, was on the committee that handled NDE complaints about teacher certification. The Nebraska Legislature disbanded that committee in 2024 due to a backlog of complaints that were not being addressed. Now, NDE has a hearing officer who makes recommendations to the commissioner about each complaint to expedite the process.
After Blunt’s complaint to the state, she said the assistant principal, Craig, singled out her son after lunch recess, “forcefully grabbed his arm, pulled him out of line, and dragged him to another location — then denied doing so,” according to the federal complaint.
Blunt met with the superintendent a few weeks later to discuss the alleged retaliation by the assistant principal and the ongoing harassment from other students. In the days following that meeting, school officials told her they wouldn’t discuss her concerns anymore. This was in the summer before her son was to enter fifth grade.
“When the school told me they were no longer going to respond or speak to me about what happened, it set in my mind, I started freaking out,” Blunt said. “I’m like, I can’t put my son back here. I can’t put him through this.”
She transferred her son to a nearby private school for the 2023-24 school year, and submitted a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in June 2023.
Sean Ouellette, one of Blunt’s lawyers with the Public Justice Students’ Civil Rights Project, said federal civil rights laws require schools that receive federal funds to protect students from discrimination, including racial harassment. The Nebraska Constitution also prohibits race-based discrimination in public schools, and further allows someone to hold the school accountable for negligence.
As Blunt and her lawyers allege in the complaint, the school’s failure to have policies in place created an unequal learning environment for Blunt’s son.
“The white students in Tara’s son’s class didn’t have to deal with these sorts of racial slurs being directed toward them,” Ouellette said. “They didn’t have to deal with being attacked because of their race and being found in the fetal position on the ground, and they didn’t have to deal with being called the N-word with all of the horrible history that word has specifically for Black people in the United States.”
Both the assistant principal, Wendy Craig, and one of the elementary school principals mentioned in the complaint have since left Falls City Public Schools. The superintendent, Tim Heckenlively, is retiring at the end of June. Another principal remains on staff. One of the teachers mentioned in the complaint is now a principal.
The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights is still investigating Blunt’s complaint. It is unclear what will happen with her complaint, as the new administration has cut the department in half, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March directing the secretary of education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
Blunt, along with a parent in Michigan and the Victim Rights Law Center, filed a lawsuit in Boston challenging the federal government’s choice to cut staffing at the Department of Education, especially in the Office for Civil Rights. Plaintiffs said these cuts and the potential elimination of the Department of Education are a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires courts to stop agencies from random and sudden actions or decisions.
According to the lawsuit, the government eliminated more than half of the Office for Civil Rights’ positions and closed seven of the twelve regional offices for the department, “leaving a hollowed-out organization incapable of performing its statutorily mandated functions. Without judicial intervention, the system will exist in name only for children who have suffered most types of discrimination.”
Not an uncommon experience
Blunt and her son aren’t alone in dealing with racism at school in a small community.
Christopher Cox, who previously worked for United by Culture Media, a nonprofit that supports people of color in rural communities, said he’s worked with young men and boys of color who feel isolated in rural areas.
“A lot of the time it’s not fully articulated, it’s kind of a feeling of, ‘Where do I fit?’” Cox said.
Cox spent the past 20 years living in several rural communities across the Midwest, including towns in Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska. He said while he loved seeing the childhood his kids had in smaller communities, there’s still work that rural areas can do to be more welcoming.
“Communities can be doing better to educate themselves and to welcome people of other color and other ethnicities in their town so that the towns can thrive,” Cox said. “Instead of having all these fractured communities, they come together as one whole community.”
Those issues, like racism and microaggressions, exist in urban areas like Omaha, but Cox said the difference is that people in big cities have a larger community they can return to and see their culture represented. That’s not the case in rural communities, where cultural circles are small and everyone has to shop at the only available store for groceries.
“There’s nowhere to hide from the constant microaggressions, and you don’t have as much people constantly pushing to educate or change so those microaggressions stop,” Cox said. “It just becomes the norm, like, ‘Oh, it’s OK. We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re not being racist.’”
Cox said those microaggressions can build up over time.
“They don’t think it’s harmful, when in reality, it just chips and chips and chips away at people’s self-esteem, or it chips away at these kids, it chips away at their parents,” he said. “It’s always those microaggressions, just like death by a thousand cuts.”
And those experiences can affect students as they grow up. Blunt’s son, who is now in sixth grade, sees a therapist in Omaha. She said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of the racism he experienced.
The family drives about two hours to Omaha and two hours back for him to meet with someone who can specifically support him with the racial trauma.
Monnica Williams, a psychologist and professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, researches and treats people dealing with racial trauma. She published a book last year detailing a plan for clinicians who treat racial trauma.
She said it can be challenging to diagnose racial trauma because the symptoms are similar to PTSD, depression and anxiety.
“There are a lot of people who suffer with racial trauma, and they may not even realize what the problem is,” she said. “They may not necessarily connect all of their experiences of racism with why they feel isolated or depressed.”
Long-term impacts of racial trauma can include risks for unhealthy substance use and suicide. Williams said there’s not a lot of research on how racial trauma affects children, but they frequently start to act differently, isolate themselves and run away or skip school.
While Williams said clinicians are starting to talk about racial trauma more, she said it’s also important for those conversations to happen in schools. She sees diversity, equity and inclusion training as helpful when supporting and protecting students dealing with discrimination that can lead to racial trauma.
“Too often it’s easy for teachers or administrators to say, ‘Oh, well, kids are kids. They do these things, no big deal,’ without really understanding the impact of these behaviors on those kids that are marginalized, that are disempowered,” Williams said. “Kids with these marginalized identities, they don’t have as many resources to fight back when things like this happen to them.”
And that education, she said, should extend outside of schools into their larger communities.
“We need much more education about the problem of racism — what racism is, why it’s wrong, what kinds of things you can do about it when you see it, rather than just trying to put a Band-Aid on it when something uncomfortable happens at school,” she said.
Illinois lawmakers passed the Racism-Free Schools Law in 2023. It requires school districts to have a policy against discrimination even though it’s already outlined in federal law. The new Illinois law also requires training for school employees on how to recognize racism and called for schools to report the total amount of discrimination and harassment incidents to the state.
“I think the law just promotes clarity, it promotes understanding and it promotes training,” Bill Curtin, policy director for the nonprofit Teach Plus, said. “I think that’s something that people can all agree on.”
He said people in rural and urban communities had different definitions of what racism looked like, especially in rural communities where there isn’t much diversity.
“It’s all the more important that the rest of the school understands the importance of not making casually racist remarks that are going to make that student, surrounded all day by those remarks, feel unwelcome in the school,” Curtin said.
That baseline is what Tara Blunt aims to achieve in her complaint to the federal government. She hopes the school district will create training and do better for future families.
“If I had to stress anything, it would be please don’t do this to another child,” Blunt said. “Please don’t do this to another family, please learn — let’s learn together. Let’s make the change. Let’s teach the kids this isn’t OK. Let’s speak out to the families that were scared to speak out about racism. Let’s just go ahead and tell them, this is not OK.”
Meanwhile, Blunt said her son is much happier at his new private school.
“It really has been a positive change in our lives,” she said. “Because he’s back to smiling all the time, excited.”
Her son is getting the chance to be a kid again. Blunt said he loves video games and playing outside — especially in the winter when it snows. Now a sixth-grader, he plays baseball in the summer and flag football in the fall. He also plays basketball, and Blunt said he wants to dunk the ball like Michael Jordan.
Blunt said the superintendent of the new school consistently advocates for her son.
“I’m not saying we didn’t have any situations because there were a few, but they handled it,” Blunt said. “That was probably the best feeling is, ‘We’re not just going to let this happen. We’re not going to let him feel like this. We’re going to do something.’”
— Former Nebraska Public Media reporter Elizabeth Rembert contributed to the reporting of this story.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here. The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
METHODS
To tell this story, reporters Jolie Peal and Elizabeth Rembert reviewed Tara Blunt’s federal complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, school records from Blunt’s lawyers, emails between Blunt and the school from Blunt’s lawyers and the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education filed in Boston. The reporters conducted interviews with Blunt and one of her lawyers to further understand Blunt and her son’s experience. They also spoke with someone who worked with students of color in rural communities, a racial trauma researcher and clinician, and someone who advocated for the Racism-Free Schools Law in Illinois to further understand the wider reach of racism in schools.
REFERENCES
“Families and victim advocates file lawsuit against U.S. Department of Education for gutting Office for Civil Rights”
(Public Justice | April 21, 2025)
“Midwest schools face civil rights investigations. Trump’s education department cuts may end them.”
(Midwest Newsroom | March 26, 2025)
Falls City census data
(U.S. Census Bureau| 2020, 2022)
“Parental concerns lead to spill over FCPS Board meeting; some Falls City Educators, Region V and The Committee for Children respond”
(Falls City Journal | 2022)
“Nebraska Professional Practices Commission”
(Nebraska Professional Practice Commission)
“Rule 28: Professional Practices Investigations, Hearings, and Determinations by the State Board”
(Nebraska Department of Education | Sept. 28, 2024)
“Does your school have a racial harassment policy? A new law requires one on the books by 2024”
(WGLT | July 21, 2023)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
Investigative or Enterprise — In-depth examination of a single subject requiring extensive research and resources.
