COLONIE, NY — Nearly a week after a racist video involving high school students surfaced in the South Colonie School District, questions remain about how the district handled the incident and what, if anything, it can legally disclose.
Attorney Ryan McCall of McCall, Sweeney & Silva, P.C., said students have a right to protest, but that does not necessarily mean they have a right to leave school during the day if it causes a disruption.
“Although students do have a right to protest, it's not inherently their right to be able to leave school during the day, potentially causing a disruption where at that point the school is going to have to do things in order to disrupt other children's school days,” McCall said.
McCall said taking legal action against the district’s response to the video would be difficult because the video was not directed toward a specific person, meaning it would not be considered cyberbullying.
He also said districts can communicate more broadly about how they plan to address racially charged incidents without violating student privacy.
“However, with that being said, the school district can ultimately come out and say we've become aware of through racially charged incidents in our school that we need to begin taking action on, and this is what we're going to be able to do in order to rectify that. Moving forward, the school district is more than able to come out with those types of corrective action plans,” McCall said.
Asked what an adequate investigation would look like, McCall said schools typically try to gather as much information as possible to ensure the findings are conclusive.
“They're going to want to talk to as many people as possible and get as many reports as possible, because what the school district doesn't want to happen is have an investigation that wasn't conclusive. So, they're going to do their best and exhaust all their resources to be able to say, okay, this is what the complaint was, this is what we investigated,” he said.
Click HERE to read Attorney McCall’s input on these new developments.