Santa Barbara Students Walk Out Over Blackface Post; District Pledges Further Discussion Students at San Marcos and Dos Pueblos high schools walked out over a blackface social media post as the Santa Barbara Unified School District board faced calls to address racism. Students at San Marcos and Dos Pueblos high schools in Santa Barbara walked out of class on Tuesday, October 13, amid controversy over a blackface social media post featuring four San Marcos High School students. The walkout came over a week after the post appeared on TikTok. That evening, students, parents and community members spoke at the Santa Barbara Unified School District board meeting.The post involved four San Marcos students who recreated an AI-generated meme by darkening their skin to mimic Black children. The Santa Barbara Independent reported that Principal Dare Holdren sent a message to families following the incident.Holdren said San Marcos High School had instituted consequences for the group of students who portrayed blackface on social media. Newsweek reached out to the Santa Barbara Unified School District via email for comment.The walkout and board meeting reflected frustration among students and staff with the response from the school board more than a week after the incident.Santa Barbara Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Hilda Maldonado addressed the board meeting, saying she wanted to address our culture of care and the harm caused by the blackface incident in San Marcos.She said what happened was racist and harmful and that there is no place for hate, racism or discrimination in the schools.Maldonado also addressed Black students and community members, saying she recognized that this reaches beyond one incident and touches deeper experiences of racism and exclusion. She said she was committed to listening.A number of speakers addressed the board during the meeting, though it was explained that there would be no official responses that night due to the volume of speakers.Charlotte Gullap-Moore, speaking in a personal capacity, said that when a nation refuses to confront institutional and structural racism, the harm does not stay contained. She said it escalates.She said Santa Barbara Unified had watched that escalation in its own schools and asked how much more Black students must endure before the district acts.Yeko, a student in the district, said that if someone who has tardies gets lunch detention, but someone who posts blackface does not, the district is clearly promoting racism.Another student, Sedenya, said that as a Black student in the Santa Barbara Unified District she had experienced many acts of racism firsthand.She said there is hardly any acknowledgment or punishment, that students had spoken up before, and that they were not being heard and deserved a voice.Maile Schoonover, a representative of the Santa Barbara Fund, cited other reported incidents involving racial slurs and harassment in Santa Barbara Unified District schools.She raised allegations of a Black student being physically assaulted, a substitute teacher using the N-word in class, racial slurs and monkey noises in school hallways, and a Black educator finding the N-word written in a classroom.Board members pledged to discuss the issue at a further meeting. Speakers said they wanted to see a response that addressed not only the blackface incident but what they described as a recurring pattern of racism in the district.The concerns raised in Santa Barbara sit against a broader national picture of racism experienced by students in schools.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 31.5 percent of U.S. high school students reported having experienced racism at school.The proportion rose to 45.9 percent among Black students and 56.9 percent among Asian students.A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office found that Black girls represented 15 percent of girls enrolled in U.S. public schools, but received nearly half of suspensions and expulsions in the 2017-18 school year.The GAO also found that Black girls received harsher punishments than White girls even when the underlying infractions were similar.