A White School Officer Pepper-Sprayed and Kneed a Black Beaumont Student, Complaint Says. Will Feds Act?

The 6-second soundless video of an April 2024 incident at Beaumont United High School starts with Ja’Liyah Celestine, a 17-year-old Black student, kneeling in the middle of a hallway, covering her eyes. 

Celestine later told the Texas Observer that, before this, Linda Holland, a white Beaumont ISD police officer waited “a long time” before breaking up a fight between her and another student, who Celestine said had instigated the fight. Celestine said that after the fight had already ended, Holland pepper-sprayed Celestine’s face, bringing her to her knees. The video, recorded by a teacher and obtained and reviewed by the Observer, shows students and teachers still circled around Celestine a few feet away, watching. Holland grabs Celestine by the hair, knees her in the face, and knocks the 4’11”, 100-pound girl on her back. Celestine’s friend attempts to pull her to her feet, while Holland shakes her head and walks away. 

“It was so much going on, and all I remember is my eyes started burning. And then after that, I remember the cop kicking me in my face. She had me by my hair. She kneed me,” Celestine told the Observer. “I was really confused. … I didn’t know that I was getting pepper-sprayed, and I was scared.” 

Six months later, in late October, Texas Appleseed, an education and juvenile justice advocacy organization, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on behalf of Celestine and other Black students in the district, alleging that Beaumont ISD “violated Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against them and disproportionately subjecting them to law enforcement referrals.” The main school district in the eponymous city of 115,000, located between Houston and the Louisiana line, Beaumont ISD is a majority-Black district in a racially diverse town. 

Beaumont (Shutterstock)

The Texas Appleseed complaint also states the district violated a state law by allowing a police officer, rather than other school staff, to engage in “routine student discipline” for minor infractions of campus or district policy. 

But, now that President Donald Trump is back in the White House and has ordered that the Education Department be gutted, Celestine may not see any relief from the feds, leaving her and other students potentially subject to discrimination looking for other recourse. In January, Trump ordered OCR attorneys to cease all investigations initiated under prior administrations. On March 11, the department cut half its total staff. Seven of 12 regional OCR offices have already been shut down, including the Dallas office, which handled complaints based in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. 

Sheria Smith, an OCR attorney, had been working out of the Dallas office for nine years before she and her coworkers were terminated, shut out of what Smith said was OCR’s busiest office. Smith, who is also president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, a union representing 2,800 Department of Education employees, told the Observer that, even in the roughly two months before the firings, OCR attorneys had “been hamstrung” in efforts to enforce civil rights laws: “We were prohibited from doing any work on any cases, moving it forward, setting up interviews with stakeholders.”

OCR is “often the last line of defense,” Smith said at an American Federation of Teachers town hall meeting. “When families come to us, they have already tried to work things out with their school district. They tried to work things out with their state.”

Even as Trump carries out plans to dismantle the Education Department, he has shifted OCR’s priorities by using the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a basis to remove gender-neutral bathrooms, ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, investigate complaints of anti-semitism and discrimination against white students, and “end DEI” in schools. Smith described the anti-DEI effort as “witch-hunting school districts and schools that might be providing services that benefited Black and brown or students of color.” 

Beth Echols, the OCR attorney assigned to Celestine’s case, last spoke to Celestine, her mom Angela Mack, and Texas Appleseed attorney Andrew Hairston around Thanksgiving, Hairston told the Observer. At the time, the agency was looking for information about racial disparities in arrest and law enforcement referrals at Beaumont ISD. Hairston received another email from Echols in mid-December, then “We’ve heard nothing in the new year,” he said. 

On March 3, a Department of Education spokesperson responded to an Observer email inquiring about the status of Celestine’s complaint: “The Office for Civil Rights does not confirm complaints.”

Since 1980, the department’s civil rights office has enforced the nation’s anti-discrimination laws in schools, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark law that dismantled legal segregation, and later the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The OCR specifically enforces Title II of the civil rights law, which ensures everyone has access to “places of public accommodations”; Title VI, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, or religion by entities that receive federal funding; and Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. The OCR also mandates school districts send civil rights-related and other data so the agency can develop research and regulations guiding school districts. 

Organizations including Texas Appleseed have also pushed state lawmakers to enact legislation reining in excessive policing, as recent laws expanded police presence in schools. In 2019, Texas passed a law barring districts from assigning “routine student discipline” to police officers or having police officers engage in “contact with students unrelated to the law enforcement duties.” Instead, bill author and former Democratic state Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. told the Observer, campus rule infractions should be “taken care of by their teachers and administration or in-house without using security officers” and “the school board [should] take quick action” to see it enforced. 

Celestine’s complaint also asserts Holland failed to comply with the Beaumont ISD Police Department’s own policy manual and Beaumont ISD’s Student Code of Conduct, which describes district disciplinary procedures for student misconduct. The police department manual requires officers “use only an amount [of force] that ‘reasonably appears necessary’ under the totality of circumstances,”  but the complaint states: “No circumstances exist to justify this excessive use of force and deprivation of Ja’Liyah’s rights.” The code of conduct lists both permissible and impermissible disciplinary techniques. “Of those techniques that are prohibited are ‘directed use of […] unpleasant spray’ near a student’s face,” states the complaint. 

Beaumont ISD spokesperson Jackie Simien provided the Observer an emailed statement saying: “BISD is aware of the allegations and disputes the characterization of the events. … The District can confirm BISD staff responded appropriately to safeguard the safe operation of the campus in compliance with policy and law.” Simien did not provide answers to other Observer questions.

Relying on local law enforcement and school districts to enforce federal, state, or local policies without oversight is challenging, Hairston said. “Generally, districts don’t have much, in my experience, willingness to stand up against the culture of school policing and the abuse that so many Black and brown children face at the hands of school police officers,” he told the Observer.

According to Texas Education Agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky, the agency does not investigate complaints of racial discrimination that might violate the Civil Rights Act, adding that “Such complaints are referred to the USDOE Office of Civil Rights.” 

Hairston told the Observer that when school districts and the state fail to protect students against discrimination in schools, typically the mere act of filing a complaint with the feds can put pressure on school districts to change practices. Without federal oversight, as the OCR is being dismantled, Hairston said school police “are going to be so emboldened.” 

Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Education Department released a report finding that racial discrimination against Black and Latino students in school discipline persisted in public schools nationwide. The agencies issued a joint letter calling on school districts to reform their practices to comply with Title VI. “Discrimination in student discipline forecloses opportunities for students, pushing them out of the classroom and diverting them from a path to success in school and beyond,” the letter stated. The report has now been removed from the Department of Education’s website. 

When Trump took office, OCR was investigating 12,000 complaints: 6,000 related to discrimination against students with disabilities; 1,000 related to sex discrimination; and 3,200 related to racial discrimination, ProPublica reported. OCR records show there are still 952 Texas-based cases left pending: 527 related to students with disabilities; 162 related to sex discrimination; and 258 related to racial discrimination. Eight of these civil rights complaints are from Beaumont ISD. 

In Beaumont ISD, law enforcement referrals disproportionately affect Black students. OCR data for the 2021-22 school year shows Black students comprised 75 percent of students arrested by school law enforcement, even though they made up 60 percent of the student population that year. TEA records show Black students made up 60 percent of the district’s student population in the 2023-24 school year, but they accounted for 85 percent of students who received out-of-school suspensions and were moved from schools into the disciplinary alternative education program (DAEP), where students receive online education under surveillance and which criminal justice advocates refer to as a step in the school-to-prison pipeline. 

Statewide, Black students made up less than 13 percent of all students enrolled in public schools in 2023-24. But TEA data for that year reveals that Black students accounted for 31 percent of students who received out-of-school suspensions and 22 percent of students sent to DAEP. 

On the same day of the Beaumont incident, Holland called Celestine’s mom, Angela Mack, to apologize, Mack said. “I thought that was very strange for an officer to reach out and apologize to me, and that was before I knew that incident between her and my daughter had happened,” Mack told the Observer. 

But Mack said Holland did not mention that she pepper-sprayed Celestine’s face, grabbed her by her hair, and kneed her. Nor did Beaumont United High School administrators inform Mack about what happened during the incident. Instead, Celestine’s friend had called Mack, and later, she saw the video. “You hear about things like this on TV all the time, and you never expect it to happen to somebody so close, let alone your child,” she said. Holland deferred to district administrators when the Observer asked her for comment on the incident.

The school suspended Celestine and required her to perform 30 hours of community service and spend 60 days in the district’s DAEP before she could return to Beaumont United. The district later reduced the time in DAEP to 30 days.

Celestine said she felt helpless. “I was sad about it, especially because of the altercation with a white police officer,” Celestine said. “And then, adding on, going to Pathways [DAEP], knowing that all this wasn’t my fault, all that happened to me, that made me even sadder.”  

Mack said she eventually met with Principal Wiley Johnson and Assistant Principal Dalana Bennett a week after the incident. “Nobody told me anything. They just thought I was an angry mom because my daughter got in a fight and I didn’t want her to go to DAEP,” Mack said. “Up until this very moment … nobody from both the Beaumont Independent School District or Beaumont United has mentioned [the police actions] to me.” 

In DAEP, Celestine said instructors demanded her to write a letter to the Beaumont United principal, apologizing for her actions. 

At the start of this school year, Celestine returned to Beaumont United and has been volunteering for a community mentoring program, holding down a job as an HEB customer service rep, and looking forward to graduation. She told the Observer she still hasn’t completely recovered from the incident, but she’s determined to keep fighting so people know that what happened to her “can happen and that it should not happen.” Hairston said that Celestine, Mack, and attorneys at Texas Appleseed are planning to file a civil suit in state court seeking a declaratory judgment that the Beaumont ISD police department violated the law by allowing a police officer to engage in routine discipline. 

“Something needs to be done to show that this won’t be tolerated,” Mack said.  

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