Security footage now has been made public showing a Black student being ordered by a white lunch monitor at a school in Lorain, Ohio, to eat food the girl had thrown in the trash.
After asking for months to see the video of the incident at Palm Elementary School, the parents of the child, who’s also suing the school, says the footage confirms everything their daughter told them.
The Lorain City School District released surveillance footage of the act on Wednesday, Jan. 19. The school district blurred the students’ faces out before its release to the public.
The incident, captured in a 34-minute full-length video released by the district, happened in November 2021.
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In the upper left corner of the abridged video, the camera shows a child throwing her finished lunch into the garbage can, telling the principal she did not like the waffles.
A white adult woman wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans pulled the food out of the trash can, wiped off the package of food and told the female student to eat what had been thrown into the garbage.
The video shows the 9-year-old fourth grader refusing to do what the adult aid asks, but eventually acquiesce. At one point the aid sits next to the student to ensure she eats the food.
Jared Klebanow, one of the attorneys representing the interest of the girl and her family, stated that the video validates the student’s recollection of the events. He also said the family has asked for months to see the video, but did not see it until the public release.
Upon seeing the video, the child reportedly was retraumatized, reliving the feelings of embarrassment and humiliation that she felt at that moment at the school last fall.
The attorney spoke of actions in the video. “What we see is a student finish with her lunch … again, a student finish with her lunch and she goes to throw the lunch away like hundreds and thousands of students across the country do every day. We see in the video, this monitor, the named defendant, go ahead and grab the waffle out of the garbage,” he continued. “And she appears to instruct the student to go get a paper towel, go back to her seat.”
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