The mother of a Black student who endured racist bullying for more than two years at a predominantly white Northwest Side elementary school is set to receive a $300,000 settlement from Chicago Public Schools.
The city’s Board of Education unanimously voted to approve the payment at its monthly meeting Thursday, more than a year after the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ published an investigation into the incessant bullying and failures by the school administration to curb it.
The student’s mother, Sher’Ron Hinton, filed a lawsuit against the district in July 2025 accusing the staff at Wildwood IB World Magnet School of “willful and wanton conduct” and negligence for allowing her daughter to be subjected to “extreme acts of race-based bullying, sexual harassment and sexual abuse.”
Hundreds of pages of school incident reports filled out by Wildwood staff and emails from educators showed the girl, who the Sun-Times and WBEZ called Jada to protect her identity, was subjected to repeated racial slurs, body-shaming, encouragement to kill herself and, in one case, touching “in places I don’t want to be touched.”
She told school employees four times in fifth grade that she had suicidal thoughts.
Hinton said reading through the incident reports was devastating.
“So when I got the documents, I asked (Jada), ‘Did this happen? Did this person do this to you?’ ” Hinton said in an interview in the spring of 2025. “And she told me that everything that was reported in her incident reports up until this year, 7th grade, happened. So it's just like, ‘How do we get justice?’"
Hinton became aware of the severe problems after her daughter came home in October 2024 and told her a student called her the n-word. The district’s Office of Student Protection substantiated that Jada was the victim of racial bullying and the students were given in-school suspensions.
In this Dec 4, 2024 “urgent request” for all 7th grade teachers sent by the director of social-emotional learning at Wildwood School, the director lists a set of protocols they should all follow to support Jada “to ensure she is safe in every single one of her classes.” The director said Jada “is feeling targeted,” that she reported that day that another student was “verbally harassing her” and that “she feels unsafe in class or in any space at Wildwood.”
The experience left Jada in extreme emotional distress and she took time off school in the spring for intensive mental health treatment, her mother said. Hinton, who had been excited for her children to go to Wildwood, transferred Jada and her four siblings out of the school after classes ended in June 2025.
Hinton declined comment Thursday.
CPS officials didn't immediately comment on the settlement.
In 2025, CPS officials defended the Wildwood administration’s handling of “incidents involving middle school students, including one student in particular.”
“In line with District policy, school leadership has consistently monitored and supported the students involved over the past two years,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement, noting that even complete school documents don’t capture everything about a school’s efforts or its communications with a family.
Some parents whose children were accused by Jada said their kids told them they were being falsely accused.
