Black Teachers’ Harassment Claims Against Beverly Hills Schools To Be Tried Together

LOS ANGELES, CA — Two Black teachers who allege they were harassed and discriminated against by students and parents alike within Beverly Hills Unified can proceed to one trial with their collective allegations, a judge has ruled, rejecting defense claims that doing so would result in a "disjointed and prejudicial" proceeding.

During a hearing Monday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brock T. Hammond said it would be less efficient, not more, to litigate the claims of Jarvis Turner and Natonda Ivory in different proceedings. He said the plaintiffs have properly joined their claims.

Attorneys for the district contended in their court papers that expecting a jury to "compartmentalize these legally and factually unrelated claims with facts as inflammatory as a political mob one plaintiff is likening to the KKK that has nothing to do with the other plaintiff is not realistic and increases the likelihood of improper cross-contamination of the evidence."

Trying the plaintiffs' claims together would result in a "disjointed and prejudicial proceeding," the defense attorneys further contended in their pleadings.

In their suit filed April 25, Turner and Ivory allege discrimination, harassment, retaliation, failure to provide reasonable accommodations and failure to take corrective action. In their previous court papers, district lawyers denied the plaintiffs' allegations.

• Read more: Black Beverly Hills Teacher Says She Was Told To Be 'Meek:' Lawsuit

Turner was named basketball coach at Beverly Hills High School in 2010 and taught sports marketing at the same campus from 2010-17. He alleges he went all the way to the superintendent to complain about a 2019 email he received on a school account that called him the "N" word, but that no serious action was taken by the district.

Turner also maintains that students have called him on his cell phone making racial epithets and that parents have made uttered ethnic stereotypes when encountering him in the gym.

Ivory says she was hired as a career and technical education teacher at BHHS in 2020. She contends that the school's theater teacher, while co- teaching a costume design class with the plaintiff, repeatedly humiliated, spoke down to and yelled at Ivory in front of other teachers and also belittled Ivory with students present.

After a meeting between the administration, Ivory and the theater teacher to hear the plaintiff's complaint, Ivory was no longer allowed to teach costume design, the suit states.

In February 2022, after a cafeteria teacher said derogatory words to Ivory when she asked him his name, an assistant principal took Ivory to a back office and told her that because she was a black woman, she needed to be "quiet, meek, passive and compliant with white counterparts," the suit states.

Black students at Beverly Hills High School have told staff members that they feel "marginalized, invisible, devalued and unsupported by the school community," according to the suit, which also states that Black pupils feel unsafe because they are called the "N" word almost daily.

"Black students are particularly distressed that the focus on campus is primarily centered around the Israel-Palestine conflict and the pain of Persian Jewish students, while their own experiences of discrimination and racism are overlooked," the suit states.

Ivory's son, a student at a BHUSD middle school, was bullied at school and had to finish the first semester in home schooling and his second semester in an online school, the suit states. In February, a BHHS student announced before an entire classroom that she hated Ivory and wanted to stab the plaintiff in the chest, but the district took no action and did not call the police, the suit alleges.

Unable to cope with her work environment any longer, Ivory resigned in the spring and took a job at a "significant pay reduction," the suit states.

City News Service