A judge last week vacated the Virginia Beach School Board’s disciplinary actions against three Kellam High School students accused of racial bullying early last year.
Circuit Court Judge Stephen A. Mahan ruled a board panel acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” because members failed to make their own “findings of fact” during a hearing last summer, according to an attorney who represented the students at last week’s hearing.
Boards must make such factual findings, the judge ruled, in order to resolve disputes as to what took place.
The ruling means that notations on the students’ disciplinary records that they were “suspended for racial harassment and bullying” will be erased. “It’s a big deal,” said Tim Anderson, the students’ attorney. “That’s obviously a lead weight for going to college. And now it’s been vacated.”
The Virginia Beach Public Schools, which sought to keep the students’ disciplinary records intact, said that after Mahan signs his order next week, the school board “will determine how to proceed with these cases,” a spokesperson said Thursday.
On March 12, 2025, a group of Kellam High School freshmen got together at their usual gathering spot before school at 7:15 a.m.
Three white students gave one of their friends — a Black student celebrating his 15th birthday — what Anderson termed a “gag gift” from friends: a pink girl’s birthday card, a bag of fried chicken and candy that included watermelon-flavored Sour Patch Kids and a grape Kool-Aid packet.
Inside the card, students had various handwritten notes, which included what Anderson termed “inappropriate racially charged bantering that was said — and received — in a friendly way.”
According to court documents, one of those statements included “Blackie, black, black, blackie monkey.”
Video surveillance at the school showed the students, including the recipient, laughing and hugging during the gift exchange, Anderson said.
In an interview this week, Anderson said the parents of the students who gave the gifts “did not condone” what they wrote in the card.
“We’ve always said that this should have been a learning incident where you sit them down and you’re like, ‘No, you can’t talk like this,’” Anderson said. “We’ve got to educate you on how to speak to each other.”
Though a school system statement later said that a Kellam teacher “intervened” to stop the incident, Anderson said four teachers were in the vicinity “and none of them intervened.”
But a teacher who had seen the interaction from a distance reported the matter to Kellam’s principal, Ryan Schubart. She told him she heard the student say, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” after getting the gifts, and that he “did not seem to reciprocate the hug” from one of the other students.
The incident led to a letter from the principal to the student body and the school’s parents the next day.
“Unfortunately, we regret to inform you about a deeply concerning situation where one of our students was subject to racist harassment from a group of other students,” the principal wrote. “This matter is being fully investigated, and the students involved will be disciplined to the fullest extent possible based upon the school division’s code of student conduct.”
That was followed by statements from lawmakers and the NAACP, and media publicity that lasted weeks.
The three students were allowed back to Kellam this past September after a suspension, though a couple have chosen to be homeschooled. But the mark on their record was upheld by both a hearing officer and a three-member panel of the Virginia Beach School Board.
“Having a discipline record of suspensions due to racial harassment, that’s not going to let you in any kind of college anywhere around here,” Anderson said.
He said crucial context behind the incident was ignored.
The group of students, Anderson explained, met at the same lounge every morning before school, ate and played basketball at lunch, and had a running text chat.
“These were good friends — 14 year old boys — acting very immaturely,” Anderson said. “What was funny for them is that they were giving their friend a girl’s birthday card, with what they thought were stupid little notes in there.”
The student who got the card, Anderson said, read it aloud at his friends’ urging, with everyone — including him — seemingly laughing together about it. The boy and his family, he said, never independently complained about what had taken place.
“This kid says all kinds of crazy things to them (in group texting chats), which I think is why they were comfortable using racially insensitive words to each other,” Anderson said, adding that the group text included a diverse group of friends.
After the teacher reported the matter to the principal, the student was asked to write a written statement, and he agreed to do so, saying the students “gave me a girl’s birthday card” and they “made me open it and read it out loud to them.”
“I laughed and thought the card was funny,” he wrote. “But what they handed me in the bag was black people food (pretty racist), and I threw it away and gave the food away to classmates.”
Later, however, he told his friends in the group text that school officials “forced” him “to write a statement about y’all.”
At Friday’s hearing, Anderson asked Mahan to remove the “racial bullying” reference from the students’ permanent record. But a lawyer with the Virginia Beach Public Schools argued for keeping the reference in place.
After a hearing that lasted more than two hours, Mahan sided with Anderson.
“The biggest problem with the case — and why the judge reversed it — was you have a school system that on day one of the investigation, publicly comes out and declares that these kids are racial harassers and that they are going to seek the maximum punishment,” Anderson said.
“They’re the judge, they’re the jury, and they never gave the kids a fair shot at being able to explain their friend group, or to be able to explain what happened,” Anderson said. “That’s always been the problem all along is that these kids never got the opportunity to tell their side of the story.”
“We’re not trying to justify what they did,” he said of the students. “But rather than trying to turn the matter into a major incident of racial bullying, what should have happened is the school should have treated this as a learning incident, rather than a punishment incident.”
Anderson also is representing the three students in a $10 million federal lawsuit that accused Schubart and other school officials of defamation and due process violations.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
