#School notecard series

One of the first Democrats elected to the town board after a decades-long domination by Republicans, Mr. Inspired to run by the racist fliers, he says he realized that “there’s some underlying issues that were really kept under the covers here” because of concerns about the town’s reputation as a desirable place to live and educate children. The next year, for the first time, Pittsford elected a Black man to the town board, Kevin Beckford, a Jamaican immigrant and former bank executive. Those fliers prompted strident denunciations from local officials, as well as antiracism rallies and the formation of a group of concerned local residents - PittsForward - committed to “addressing systemic and institutional racism.”

#School notecard series

In 2016, a series of fliers directing people to a white supremacist website were anonymously left on residents’ driveways in Pittsford and a neighboring town. But that assessment has done little to quell concerns of parents who say their children have endured racial taunts and other incidents with little consequences for their harassers. The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office said the teenager, who has been suspended and has not returned to school, was not an immediate danger, noting that the weapon was an air pistol and that the video was recorded months ago. To kill Black people, he answered, using a racial slur.įor some parents and students, the video has laid bare what they say is a larger pattern of racist incidents in the largely white town, where local officials are now scrambling to address those concerns. “People be like, ‘Why do you carry a gun?’” the boy says in the short clip, pulling out the weapon. When students in the town of Pittsford, N.Y., an affluent suburb just outside Rochester, flowed back into schools this fall, something troubling emerged: a video of a white student brandishing a gun and making a racist threat.