Black Girl Bullied By Racists – School Does Nothing in Austin

Yeah…I know…Its Texas. The 999 great things you can say about the state are sadly mitigated by the 999 bad.

The issue here is the School Administrators are enabling racist behavior. Meaning they support it. Now, in the civilized world, these school administrators would be looking at some 1 on 1 meetings with the Superintendent…And based on those conversations…looking for new jobs.

 

Georgetown middle school girl called an ape, slave by fellow students

A girl at Tippit Middle School in Georgetown told an African-American girl in May that she looked like an ape and also referred to her as a slave and pretended to whip her, according to a written report from the school.

A male student also made a racial remark to the black student, the report said.

The father of the 12-year-old student who was harassed, Robert Ranco, said last week the school didn’t appropriately discipline the girl or other students who were involved. None of the students were suspended, said Ranco, who is a civil rights lawyer in Round Rock.

He said the district didn’t even refer to the incidents that happened as bullying.

“It makes me feel like the school district is sweeping this under the rug,” he said. “Georgetown ISD has had a least a few suicides in the last five years resulting from bullying. … I don’t have that concern for my daughter, but I’m sure other parents didn’t think their kids were suicidal, either.”

The Georgetown school district didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday. According to the school’s report, Ranco’s daughter “was a victim of more than one incident of racially harassing conduct from classmates.”

The report said “all substantiated misbehavior by the involved students was addressed and consequences were assessed in accordance with our Georgetown I.S.D. Student Code of Conduct and with our campus restorative justice approach to discipline management.”

The document didn’t give details about the discipline except that the school “provided additional re-teaching to students who engaged in inappropriate behaviors.”

The incidents began in March when a girl followed Ranco’s daughter around a tennis court with a long piece of trash, “pretending to whip (the girl) and saying words to the effect of “You’re my slave now!” the report said. It said no one on the school’s staff saw the incident.

During another incident in March, Ranco’s daughter pointed out a male student in the cafeteria who had started a lunchtime dispute, the report said. The boy said, “It wasn’t me,” the document said. “You’re not really going to take the word of a BLACK person over the word of a WHITE person, are you?” he said, according to the report.

It said that after Ranco and his daughter met with a school counselor in March about what happened, the boy apologized to Ranco’s daughter.

The third incident happened in May, the report said, when the girl who had pretended to whip Ranco’s daughter on the tennis court walked into a classroom and asked a male student nearby why he was sitting there. It said the male student replied, “Because I don’t sit next to apes” and moved away from Ranco’s daughter.

The other girl then held up a photo of an ape on her cellphone and said to Ranco’s daughter, “This is what you look like,” the report said. It said Ranco’s daughter said, “That’s racist and mean. Stop it!”

The girl kept scrolling through photos of apes and “asking aloud which one look most like” Ranco’s daughter while other students nearby laughed, the report said.

Ranco said he asked the school’s principal to not allow the students to take part in an athletic competition the next day, but that they were allowed to do so.

He said he also asked the mother of the girl involved in two of the incidents to meet with him, but that she wouldn’t.

“It’s hard not to think kids learned this behavior from their parents,” Ranco said. “That’s part of the problem.”

 

Black Student, Teacher Have Heated Debate Over Use of N*Word

A white teacher defended the use of the N-Word as being commoditized and meaningless anymore. A black student was having none of it.

Seems to me, it is a valid academic discussion. Here is hoping that the administration uses this as a teaching moment instead of penalizing either the Teacher or Students.

‘It’s f*cking racist’: Watch a black teen confront his white teacher who insists on using the N-word

Students angrily confronted a white New Orleans teacher who insisted he could use the most notorious racial slur because it had been drained of its meaning through overuse.

Video recorded Thursday by students at Ben Franklin High School, recently ranked as Louisiana’s top public high school, showed the permanent substitute teacher explaining his position as students angrily and profanely challenged him, reported The Times-Picayune.

“That’s racist as sh*t,” one black student says to the teacher, identified only as “Coach Ryan.” “Why can you not understand that it’s racist for a white man to say ‘n****r’ to a black man? It’s f*cking racist.”

The student then turns to a white classmate and asks if he’d ever use the racial slur, and the other boy agrees he would not, and the black teen then rhetorically asks the rest of his classmates if they would.

“F*ck no, they wouldn’t say ‘n****r,’” he tells the teacher.

The teacher asks the teen if he knows what a “commoditized word” means, and the student asks him to explain the term.

“It’s a word that’s used so many times that it doesn’t mean its original meaning,” the teacher says. “The word has been commoditized so that anyone can use it, and it’s not a negative connotation.”

The student argues that it would have a negative connotation for the teacher to use it to describe him, but the teacher asks why rappers use the racial slur in songs.

“If you say the word, it means friend, but if I say the word, it means something different,” the teacher says.

The teen says the meaning changes, based on the speaker’s race, and the teacher insists that’s not true.

“Not if you want the world to move on,” the teacher says. “If you want this world to be the way it was 50 years ago, then you’re true — you’re right.”

The teenager tries to explain the difference between the full word, n****r, and the truncated colloquialism, n***a.

“Nobody says n****r,” the teacher says, as the teen explodes and his classmates giggle nervously.

“Don’t f*cking say that,” the boy says. “You can’t say ‘n****r’ or ‘f*cking n****r’ … you’re my f*cking teacher, don’t say that sh*t.”

The teacher tries to argue that he could use the word as part of an academic lesson on its history, but the student angrily slams a book down on a desk and tells the teacher to stop using the racial slur.

“Please, it’s a word,” the teacher says. “You cannot go through life acting like a word can affect you.”

Students went after class to the principal’s office to stage a sit-in, but that turned into an impromptu, hour-long assembly on race and racism, the newspaper reported.

The school, which is overseen by the Orleans Parish School Board, is one of the most diverse in New Orleans — with 40 percent white students, 31 percent black, 16 percent Asian, 7 percent Hispanic and 6 percent multi-racial.

Another Franklin teacher also used a racial slur during this school year, students said on social media.

Franklin alumni started an online petition after the latest incident pledging to withhold donations until meaningful action was taken by the school.

The teacher was not on campus Thursday afternoon, and school officials said an investigation of the incident could take several days before any potential disciplinary action was taken.

 

Students Begin Anti-Trump Rebellion

That was quick…

Students Stage Anti-Trump Walkouts Across the Country

After Donald Trump won the election on Tuesday night, high school students across the country staged walkouts to protest him on Wednesday.

In New York City, high schoolers marched down Second Avenue.

Students in Arizona walked out in protest of Trump and Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who lost in his election on Tuesday.

 

 

The Well Dressed Man Makes a Comeback

In the area that I lived in growing up, the system for integrating schools started the first few years at the Elementary and Middle School level. I was one of the first black males to attend an “integrated” Junior High School (7th and 8th Grades) in my county.There were a whopping 2 black boys and 5 black girls that first year in a school of 1800.

My father took me out “shopping” before the first class, and purchased for me 5 white shirts, and several ties. My Dad was known by friends and family for always wearing crisp white shirts,a tie, and a suit to work every day. He was a strong believer in looking respectable to be respected.

Every morning he would check me to make sure I had my “uniform” on before school. Heaven help me if I stopped by on the way home for a game of baseball with the other kids in the neighborhood and got my clothes dirty!

As we got to know each other better, some of the white kids would tease me about always wearing a tie to school – and being the “best dressed” kid in Junior High. They would ask why I always wore a white shirt and tie – I just passed it off as a “Dad thing”.

I found later in the business world that how people perceived you, and how well your initial introductions went depended highly on how well you were dressed. A Sales guy in the company I worked for at the time taught me to always dress one cut above the client, and that the perception of being successful was just as important as the fact itself.

The goal was to look professional, and as I rose in the ranks, the make, quality, fabric, and cut of your suit and accessories indicated whether you “belonged”.

Look professional…To be professional Glad to see some youngsters have figured this out.

How the Well Dressed Movement Demolished Black Stereotypes

Kwame Phipps looking great at Syracuse University

Three African-American students at Syracuse coincidentally dressed up on the same day, and soon decided to form a movement to combat prejudice sartorially.

I met Kwame Phipps five years ago, at the end of his junior year in high school, through a Harlem-based youth development organization to help him apply to college. He was always neatly dressed and attentive to his grooming. So I am not surprised he would become a founder of the Well Dressed Movement at Syracuse University to promote better dress habits among his peers.

One reason I volunteered to mentor students like Kwame is that media portrayals of young black men have burdened them with numerous disquieting stereotypes. Like many stereotypes people affix to particular groups, they are highly simplistic and often neglect larger societal issues that produce and perpetuate misperceptions. Such perceptions prove harmful to nearly all black men. Young men like Phipps are often overlooked in such generalizations, so he and his friends have taken conscious steps to dispel negative myths.

Phipps, a 2016 Syracuse graduate, and his roommates, Joshua Collins and Elijah Biggins, started the Well Dressed Movement as a direct effort to counter some misperceptions. In 2014, their sophomore year, each had dressed up one day, but Phipps said, “It was random. I had an internship, Josh had a job interview, and Eli had a class presentation.” Unaware each had dressed up, “we left our apartment at different times and met later at the library for a social. Everyone saw us and asked why we were dressed up. We pretended it was intentional and said it was “Well Dressed Wednesday.” From there, they decided to make a Wednesday tradition of dressing up and enlisted their friends to join them.

They began the Well Dressed Movement in the wake of high profile killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and college campuses were rife with discussion about race. Syracuse was no different. Phipps said there was extensive racist dialogue in online articles in the school newspaper, The Daily Orange, and on Yik Yak, a location-based social media platform popular on college campuses.

“My friends and I are from inner city Philadelphia, Paterson (New Jersey), and New York City,” and they felt the sting of such commentary. Dressing up was a constructive response to address perceptions others might have about them. They took inspiration from earlier black pioneers who tackled social justice issues. The group’s motto, When you look good, you feel good,facilitated engagement with their peers. Their movement took hold and spread to other campuses, including Binghamton, Cornell, Howard, and Pace universities and Utica College, which validated their efforts.

Looking good takes money, however. As budget-conscious millennials, they shopped at H&M, Zara, local thrift stores, and they tracked sale items at Macy’s. It was worth the effort. Phipps said dressing up without a specific purpose elicited positive responses from those with whom he interacted, and it instilled a professional mindset in him.

“Dressing up on campus prepped me for interviews,” he said. “I already had the pieces, so I didn’t have to think about it too much. Because I had already experimented with different combinations, I can put on an outfit and be confident beforehand.”

Practice paid off: While still in school, he had internships and summer jobs at places like the Ford Foundation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington.

Phipps described his style as “trendy with my own personal touch.” A wardrobe necessity for him is “a navy blue suit, because you can dress it up or dress it down. It’s a suit you can match with other pants or jackets.” He added, “You can use it for going out, a job interview, to go to dinner. It’s a good essential to start with.”

 

Detailing with colors and accessories is his personal touch. “I like to incorporate hints of gold, if possible.” When it comes to ties, Phipps said, “I mainly choose neckties, because when you’re dressing up, you have more options. A bow tie is more extravagant and you’re making a statement with one. And not a lot of bow ties go with certain shirt combinations.” A final item for him, the pocket square, which “adds a nice touch to your outfit. You can find a set on Amazon or eBay for $10.” When he’s dressed casually, however, Phipps prefers jeans, Adidas, and Nikes. “I also like classic T-shirts and bomber jackets,” he added….Read the rest here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wRHBLwpASw

 

Columbia Professor – Safer For Black Kids to Use Drugs Than Interact With Police

I think the Professor’s point here is that the common narrative utilized by Police of the “Drug crazed” perpetrator is just so much bullshit. In fact, many of the people the Police have violent interactions with suffer from Mental Illness, not crack overdose.

In the recent Keith Scott Murder by Cop, the Police tried to justify their actions with the victim smoking a blunt. Well…I went to college in the late sixties, and remember walking into more than one concert at an indoor pavilion where you could just about get a contact high from the thousands of folks lighting up. I certainly don’t recall white folks going crazy at the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Concert, or the more diverse crowd at a WAR concert whipping out their guns and shooting at each other. Indeed, about the only thing that happened in those days smoking a joint was to get paranoid, get the munchies, and giggle a lot.

Smoking a joint ain’t Armed Bank Robbery.

Police are trained in this country to take absolute control of a situation (except when dealing with white folks). Unfortunately the  folks who train these Cops don’t do much to train them to de-escalate a situation…Or where use of force is appropriate. If your Police force is slamming people to the ground and locking them up for Jaywalking, or any of the thousands of minor Civil Violations typically handled by a ticket…

You have a PROBLEM. And that is exactly the problem we have in this country between Police and minorities. For every one of these Murders by Cop, there are tens of thousands of interactions by minorities  with Police which go off the rails in substantive ways.

So the breakdown in trust between the Police and the community comes to this – fear of calling the Police to handle an issue. You as a citizen don’t know whether you are going to get that “Good Cop”, who is helpful, deescalates the situation, and handles things appropriate to the severity of the situation – or the “Bad Cop” who rushes in with guns drawn because you have a dispute with your neighbor over his dog coming into your yard.

Ivy League professor: ‘I would much rather my own children interact with drugs than with the police’

Carl L. Hart was surprised when a student in one of his classes at Columbia University wrote an essay for The Washington Post about the effect of having him speak frankly about his past and the importance of having non-white faculty members.

Hart took the opportunity to respond with his thoughts on race and higher education, in the midst of the national debate over police violence. 

For the past few years, like academic semesters, the killing of black people by the police has been on a regular schedule.

The explanation script, always controlled by the police, is familiar and tired. The deceased person’s reputation is dragged through the mud. He had a gun or she was under the influence of some drug; therefore, deadly force was necessary.

Video footage almost always contradicts this official account. But it doesn’t seem to matter because the police are rarely held accountable in such cases.

As a result, there is community outrage that sometimes reaches the level of unrest. Authorities call for calm and peace — rather than justice — and then we are forced to have the same national conversation about race and diversity that we have had for more than 50 years. The only thing that changes is the names of the pundits paraded before the public.

As a professor, a black professor, I often think about the impact that this has on my students, especially the black students. What messages does it send to them? I suspect, with horror, it sends the same ones that I received when in their seats some 30 years ago: “Your life is worthless compared with a white person’s. They are superior to you by the mere fact that they are white in a white-controlled world.”

Faced with this wretched reality, every Monday and Wednesday morning, I stand before my Columbia University students honored to have the opportunity to present information that challenges society’s views about black people as well as the perceptions held about drugs, their effects and their role in crime.

I speak candidly about my past and who I am. In fact, “High Price,” my science memoir, is one of the required readings for the course. In it, I detail my imperfections and past drug use and sales. I also lay out a blueprint for how one can succeed as a scientist and academic in a world that despises one’s people.

I explain how for more than 25 years, I have studied the interactions between the brain, drugs and behavior, trying to understand how drugs influence the function of brain cells, how this and other social factors influence human behavior, and how the reverberations of morality regarding drug use are expressed in social policy.

And, as a part of my research, I have given thousands of doses of drugs, including crack cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, to people. By the way, I have never seen a research participant become violent or aggressive while under the influence of any drug (at doses typically used recreationally), as police narratives frequently claim.

My research has taught me many important lessons, but perhaps none more important than this — drug effects, like semesters, are predictable; police interactions with black people are not. In encounters with police, too often the black person ends up dead. That is why I would much rather my own children interact with drugs than with the police.

I am certain that my white colleagues, when faced with an emergency situation, wouldn’t think twice about calling the police. This, however, may not be the case for their black and Latino students. These students may be faced with the dilemma of not calling for police assistance even when they are in need of help for fear that the police will make the situation worse, and may even kill them or their loved one.

We need our universities to comprise historically excluded faculty to represent these and other perspectives. For this reason, I served on Columbia’s Task Force on Diversity in Science and Engineering, working to increase the number of diverse faculty in the sciences.

Initially, I was excited to participate because I thought the goal was to increase the number of faculty from those groups historically excluded from the academy as a result of discrimination.

It turns out that the term “diversity” can be anything from black faculty to military veterans. Well, I am both, but have yet to be subjected to discrimination because I’m a veteran.

I now cringe whenever subjected to meetings or speeches about the importance of having a diverse campus community. I’m even more appalled when I hear some vacuous university administrator touting their school’s diversity accomplishments. Of the nearly 4,000 faculty members at Columbia, only about 4 percent are black. Yet, we have been honored for our diversity achievements.

When compared with similar institutions, our low number of black faculty looks impressive. But when you consider that black people make up 25 percent of the population of New York City, where Columbia is located, 4 percent seems meager. I recognize that New York City might not be the most appropriate comparison, but neither are other exclusive universities whose numbers of black faculty are abysmally low.

Teaching university students affords me the opportunity to demonstrate to young adults that they don’t have to be perfect to make contributions to their country.

This responsibility also requires me to impress upon my students that they must obtain the necessary critical-thinking skills to be informed and that they should be courageous, especially in the face of injustice.

If only more of our university and national leaders did the same, I might not have to look out into the sea of predominantly white faces and hold back tears as I think about the fact that Ramarley Graham and Michael Brown would have begun their junior and senior years, respectively, this semester.

 

“White Student Union” Attacks Black Student Union at U of Illinois

Proving once again, racism isn’t just in the imagination of black students…

‘White Student Union’ challenges Black Lives Matter at University of Illinois

A Facebook page ostensibly created for an audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Illini White Students Union” has drawn fire after it characterized the national Black Lives Matter movement as “terrorism.”

Created Wednesday after a protest sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, the page declared itself “for white students of University of Illinois to be able to form a community and discuss our own issues as well as be able to organize against the terrorism we have been facing from Black Lives Matter activists on campus,” as the Daily Illini reported.

The page did not last long in its original incarnation, but was taken down after three hours. It has since been revived here.

“We recognize the right to free speech, and we encourage you to exercise that right when you see examples of racism, discrimination or intimidation on our campus,” Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson, who called the page “extremely disturbing,” wrote in a message Thursday to the student body.

In an anonymous message to the News-Gazette, the page’s administrator discussed Black Lives Matter.

“We feel they disrupt student daily life and activity far too much,” the message read, saying that movement “marginalizes” white students. “… We are in the United States and not Africa and we don’t desire to have an African flag on campus.”

The current page is bare bones — just a few links to news stories about the controversy with an image of a statue on campus. The “about” section dedicated the page to “White Pride and a safe place for White students,” according to the News-Gazette, though that page appeared to have changed.

A recent post was a clip from the 1998 film “American History X,” in which Edward Norton plays a white supremacist. In the clip, billed as “revelant to all Ferguson news,” Norton’s character denounces the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

“It’s a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go and loot a store, nothing more,” Norton says. “… Lincoln freed the slaves what, like, 130 years ago. How long does it take you to get your act together?”

While this was certainly eyebrow-raising, the original page was even more provocative.

“Feel free to send in pictures you take of any black protestors on the quad so we know who anti-whites are,” one message read, as FOX 55 reported….Read the Rest Here…

 

 

The Importance of Black Teachers

And this isn’t just because HBCUs generated nearly 10 percent of all Black STEM doctoral degree recipients. Black kids do better in school with the presence of black teachers...

But… White kids need them too!

Why Schools Need More Teachers of Color—for White Students

Noah Caruso, 17, calls South Philadelphia home. Known for cheesesteaks, pizza, and bakeries, South Philly is a close-knit, largely Italian American neighborhood where much of the population has traditionally shared the same background, culture, and race. Though an influx of immigrants has made the area more diverse in recent decades, South Philly, like the rest of the city, remains highly segregated. Caruso’s predominantly white community was echoed at his middle school, Christopher Columbus Charter School, where he says all of his teachers were white like him, as were virtually all of his classmates. It was against this backdrop that Caruso enrolled in Science Leadership Academy (SLA)—a public magnet high school in the city—and landed in the freshman English class of Matthew Kay, his first black teacher.

Now a rising senior, Caruso looks back with appreciation on his ninth-grade year in Kay’s class. “He’s the most inspiring teacher I ever had by far,” Caruso said, recalling Kay’s emphasis and commentary on fraught topics such as present-day racism. “He definitely pushed us to really think about these social issues [that] weren’t talked about before in my life because everyone grew up in the same area,” he continued. “We were all white … and everyone had the same opinion.” Caruso recalled a class in which Kay had students watch a scene from American History X, a graphic 1998 film about neo-Nazis and white supremacy in America. The teacher, Caruso noted, didn’t hold back in expressing his perspective on the persistence of prejudice in the country. It was one of many discussions with Kay that Caruso said opened his eyes “to all of these things I never even thought about before … It inspired me to want to do something about it.”

The importance of recruiting and retaining more teachers of color for students of color is well-reported and deeply researched. Most teachers—over 80 percent—are white, and surveys suggest that won’t change anytime soon. Among the ACT-tested graduates in 2014 who said they planned on pursuing an education major,72 percent were white, compared to 56 percent of all tested students. Yet nonwhite children are now believed to make up a majority of the country’s public-school population. Studies show that, academically, nonwhite teachers produce more favorable outcomes for students of similar backgrounds; emotionally and socially, these educators serve as role models who share students’ racial and ethnic identity. What hasn’t gotten much attention, however, are the potential gains for white students.

The call for more teachers of color has grown more urgent in recent years because of America’s changing demographics. In an increasingly multiracial, multicultural society, some education experts question the impact on white students’ world views when the face of teaching almost always mirrors their own. Gloria Ladson-Billings, an African American professor of urban education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, broached this subject in a recent essay forEducation Week responding to the apparent decline in nonwhite teachers—what some observers have described as a “disappearance crisis.” “I want to suggest that there is something that may be even more important than black students having black teachers and that is white students having black teachers! It is important for white students to encounter black people who are knowledgeable,” she wrote. “What opportunities do white students have to see and experience black competence?”

In public schools, where roughly 90 percent of the country’s children are enrolled, the lessons students learn are often skewed because of who is delivering the instruction and what kind of curricula and learning materials that instruction entails. Not only is the vast majority of the country’s teaching force white, but Eurocentric attitudes also tend to filter into classrooms. Some scholars, including the Temple University African American studies professor Ama Mazama, even attribute the notable rise in homeschooling among black families in part to the predominance of Eurocentric school curricula and teacher perspectives. American children’s literature is also often limited to white characters and narratives…

The societal advantages of more teachers of color become clearer when considering the racial socialization—or the processes by which people develop their ethnic identities—of white adults, including the parents who may stumble in communicating racial understanding to their children. A Public Religion Research Institute study on “American Values” circulated last summer, following the shooting in Ferguson, showed that 75 percent of white Americans have all-white social networks. This self-segregation could help explain the racial divide over Michael Brown’s death and why it was seemingly so hard for many whites to understand what transpired in Ferguson: Their worldview was restricted to mostly white friends and family. And in a 2014 study researchers found that “the messages that white teens received [from parents regarding race] were contradictory and incomplete,” concluding that schools are a crucial link in building “productive and genuine relationships” between whites and people of color…

Of course, integrated and diverse student bodies are just as important as interracial student-teacher pairings when it comes to building a more racially literate generation. Greta Haskell, another student at SLA, where thedemographics closely reflect those of Philadelphia, said learning alongside students of color helps actualize the new perspectives she gains from nonwhite teachers. Last December, Haskell participated in a “die-in” at SLA to protest the non-indictment in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. “If I went off to college [as a white student] and didn’t know how to interact with [people not like me] I wouldn’t feel prepared,” Haskell said.

 The racial composition makes the school a place where students “listen to each other and absorb what the other students are saying and make sense of it,” said Larissa Pahomov, an SLA teacher of color who serves on the school’s diversity committee. And according to the education professor Genevieve Siegel-Hawley,white students are “more likely to have a concrete understanding of racial and social injustices” and less likely to be prejudiced when they’re immersed in racially diverse schools. Still, the push for diverse schools—which in part because of housing segregation are uncommon nationwide—typically highlights an array of benefits for students of color, rather than that for their white counterparts….(The entire article here)

 

150 Girls Poisoned For Going to School in Afghanistan

Sometimes I come to the conclusion that the only way to “solve” the Islamic nutcase problem in Afghanistan is to go “Roman”.

That is, like in Biblical times – go scorched earth and kill every male child over the age of 6 in the country.

Look up “chickenshit” on the Web – Shortly there will be a picture of the punk azz Afghani fathers who let the Taliban who committed this crime live afterwards.

Report: 150 Afghan schoolgirls poisoned

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan – About 150 schoolgirls were poisoned Tuesday after drinking water at their high school that was contaminated, Reuters reports. Local officials blamed the incident on radicals opposed to women attending school.

Reuters said the girls suffered headaches and vomiting, with some in critical condition.

“This is not a natural illness. It’s an intentional act to poison schoolgirls,” Haffizullah Safi, head of Takhar province’s public health department, told Reuters.

The Taliban banned education for women when it controlled Afghanistan, saying it was anti-Islamic.

Girls have gone back to school since the Taliban were toppled, but attacks against female students, teachers and school buildings have occurred, particularly in southern and eastern areas of the country, when Taliban insurgents enjoy more public support.