West Texas parents say racist incidents are going unchecked after the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights retreated from investigating schools.

A Black high school football player was called a “b—h-ass” n-word during a game by white players in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a white girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a white teacher of having a vape (it was a pencil sharpener) and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this fall, her mom said.

“They’re breaking people,” said Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader of the NAACP chapter in Lubbock, referring to local schools’ treatment of Black children. “It’s just open season on our students.”