OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) — Parents at an East Bay elementary are having some difficult conversations with their children Monday night after a very racist expression wound up in the school’s yearbook that just came out. ABC7 News I-Team reporter Dan Noyes has exclusive information on how this happened, and what comes next.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about students from kindergarten through the fifth grade who are exposed to this. The school’s explanation for what happened and the steps they’re proposing are not getting a very positive reaction from parents.
The joy of kids heading off for summer vacation at Oakland’s Montclair Elementary has been interrupted by a very racist entry in the school yearbook, Otter Magic.”
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Natalie Golden, student’s aunt: “I was mad. I was very upset.”
Brenda Mitchell, student’s grandmother: “I was like, what the hell is this?”
To go along with the theme of “celebrating 100 years,” parent volunteers on the yearbook included some articles about the school from The Montclarion newspaper. This one from 1940 discussed the annual carnival, “Boy and Girl Scouts will have charge of booths and many attractions such as n****r babies.”
Beyond exposing their kids to the N-word, parents scrambled to find out what that game was about. The Jim Crow Museum produced this video called “Blacks as Targets” that included a skit from almost a hundred years ago about the “N-word babies” game.
Museum video: “I usually have a little colored boy who places his head in the hole and the natives throw the ball at him. I sell them three balls for a nickel.”
And this is an authentic photograph of the game from a Wisconsin summer camp brochure from 1942.
“This is 2025 – 1900s, what do the kids need to know about?” Brenda Mitchell said. “Why would you bring that out? Why would you even put that in there? It was very inappropriate. Very inappropriate.”
Montclair Elementary principal David Kloker invited the parents last Friday “for a circle about racial equity” acknowledging the “larger narrative of racial hostility felt by some families and students” at the school.
PTA president Sloane Young said, “And today we are leading a restorative justice circle so that we’ve invited the community out so we can hear their voices and how, and how this event made them feel.”
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Principal David Kloker wouldn’t let us attend the meeting to hear the parents’ concerns. He also refused to be interviewed.
Principal Kloker sent this email apologizing, calling the article “deeply hurtful and entirely unacceptable” and telling parents to remove that page, or use a sticker provided by the school to cover it up.
Mitchell: “Put a sticker over it. What do you mean, put a sticker over it?”
Golden: “Yeah. That’s unacceptable. What they should have done is collected all the yearbooks and redone them, and then passed them back out.”
Mitchell: “First of all, they should have checked all these. They should have checked it at least.”
Mitchell: “Where was that? Where was the proofing of that? Who did? Who? Who put that in there? We want to know.”
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The PTA Historian sent parents an email admitting she was the one who “discovered what appeared to be an interesting article. … In my excitement, I made the critical error of only reading the first paragraph before including it.” She said the four-person volunteer yearbook team made the same mistake and failed to read every word. Montclair’s PTA president tells us, they are offering refunds to families.
Sloane Young: “And I will be here all summer ensuring that every family, either the yearbook is mailed out or I swap it out for them personally.
Dan Noyes: “So you’re actually doing another version of the yearbook.”
Young: “We are doing another version. If you request it, you will have it and I will deliver it.”
The PTA historian says she is stepping down from the yearbook committee and passing the baton to a new PTA historian this fall. The Oakland NAACP president tells us they are very concerned about how this happened and are working to find out more answers.
Take a look at more stories by the ABC7 News I-Team.
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