What would you do if your child was beaten up by a larger child at school, got a concussion, and no school official informed you about the incident?
You probably wouldn’t expect school officials to retaliate against your child when you started to ask questions. Unfortunately, according to parent Kayla Sollars, this has been her experience, and it led to a months-long battle with one of North Texas’s largest ISDs.
Sollars explained that the situation began on the playground when a student assaulted her son, Jacob. The offending student, who is black and was playing in a different area, yelled, “You stupid white boy,” while charging across the playground, where she allegedly struck Jacob several times.
At one point, Sollars said the student kicked Jacob in the genitals, causing him to fall and hit his head.
When the school day ended, Jacob was late for pickup. He got into his mother’s car, complaining of a headache but refusing to discuss why.
When they got home, Jacob started throwing up.
Sollars checked his backpack for a teacher’s or nurse’s note, but when she did not find one, she assumed Jacob had a stomach bug. So, she put him to bed.
The next day, the issue persisted.
Jacob’s father noticed scrapes on his son’s shins. Jacob explained that he had been in a fight with another student and could not remember the fight when he first came home.
Sollars was well aware of the student who had allegedly beaten up her son because she had told Jacob she was 12 years old, an unusual age for a fifth grader, and had to leave another school district under unclear circumstances.
According to Sollars, her son, who has ADHD, has a slight build and is comparatively smaller than his classmates, including the student who she said attacked him.
Sollars was shocked that no one from the school had told her what happened. She wondered if anyone knew about the alleged altercation. As it turned out, Jacob was late for pickup because the vice principal made him write a statement about the incident. Sollars found this outrageous.
“So instead of taking you to the nurse or calling me, they made you write a statement?” Sollars asked rhetorically.
Sollars photographed his shin and emailed the vice principal to air her concerns, who called her the following morning. “She doesn’t want to put anything in email,” Sollars claimed, referring to the vice principal’s decision to phone Sollars rather than respond to her email.
According to Sollars, the vice principal claimed that she did not know anything about the alleged assault but agreed, at Sollars’s urging, to have Jacob examined by the school nurse.
“What I know now, from the documents I have now, she knew the whole time,” Sollars explained.
Sollars supplied these documents to The Dallas Express, which appear to corroborate her story.
Not only did the vice principal appear to know of the assault, but emails and other school records indicate that the school resource officer and counselor knew as well. Several teachers also reportedly observed the fight, yet no adult party contacted Sollars.
“I have so much proof now, it is really disgusting what they have done,” Sollars added.
Jacob’s physician confirmed that he had a concussion, Sollars said.
Simultaneously, Jacob became overwhelmed with social scorn from his classmates for having been beaten up by a girl. This was a recurrent theme in Jacob’s social interactions and something Sollars said other students used as a dig at her son.
This was the last straw for Sollars.
The female student who allegedly assaulted Jacob had threatened him before. The administration reportedly knew this because they had arranged a “Stay Away Agreement” where the two students would not be put near each other or allowed to interact.
Sollars appealed to the principal but said they were met with “playing dumb … chuckles and shrugs.” Sollars said the principal did not suspend the other student or commit the school to further efforts to ensure her son’s security.
Jacob’s parents initiated a Level One grievance.
Texas Education Code Section 11.1511 mandates at least three levels of grievances through which parties can resolve education issues. Level One is with the school or principal. Level Two is with the superintendent or superintendent’s designee. Level Three is with the school board of trustees. In cases other than disciplinary decisions and when all other forms of appeal are exhausted, the state allows parties to appeal to the Commissioner of Education.
“That is when the retaliation started,” Sollars explained, adding, “teachers emailing home for really ticky tacky things.”
When school returned to session after Christmas Break, Jacob was slapped by another student and allegedly called “a li’l bitch” for getting beaten up by a girl. There was a video of the slap, and Sollars has seen it. However, she said the district denied that there was actually a slap in the video and blamed Jacob for “squar[ing] up [after the hit]” like he was going to fight back, “so he is in the wrong just as much as them,” Sollars claimed she was told.
Sollars escalated to a Level Two grievance and included the slapping incident.
Sollars said that during this process, she obtained the disciplinary record of the student allegedly responsible for the slap and found out he had been written up for the slap, a piece of documentation that would seemingly contradict the district’s statement that nothing had occurred.
Nevertheless, the head of legal affairs denied the Level Two grievance.
Meanwhile, Sollars felt that the school had sharpened its focus on Jacob. Documents obtained by DX contain several instances of Jacob being written up for vaguely described offenses. However, one illustrative example came on March 8, 2024, when Jacob got suspended for expressing an interest in playing with a BB gun and drawing a tank.
Records indicate that Jacob had expressed an interest in wanting “to bring a gun to school and pretend shoot people” and “pretend shoot his brother.” However, the Incident Report created by the School Resource Officer immediately conceded that the case manager believed this to be a BB gun that Jacob had received for Christmas.
The file enumerated Jacob’s other purported offenses, including reading World War II books and then drawing a tank, as well as playing popular video games such as Grand Theft Auto.
The file included a variety of contextual information that appears to undermine any credible identification of Jacob as a threat, including the fact that Mr. Sollar is a marine and Jacob’s mother’s assurance that while they do own guns, they are not accessible to the boys, and all BB gun usage is supervised.
There was also an entry about Jacob purportedly liking to make jokes about having bombs in his backpack. However, the record indicates that all involved parties, including students and staff, know this to be a “joke.”
Despite these facts, records indicate that school staff conducted a “threat assessment” of Jacob, searched his backpack –– finding only a fake dog poop toy –– and suspended him.
For the threat assessment, Sollars said she filed a separate grievance with human resources because McKinney ISD policy requires parental consent for something like this to occur. She said that this grievance was “denied in part and granted in part” because the district’s HR administrators found that while it was a violation of policy, “staff had not had adequate training and were not aware [of the requirement].” So, the punishment stood.
Sollars immediately withdrew Jacob from McKinney ISD and filed a Level Three grievance.
A month later, Sollars briefly considered putting him back into the school system so Jacob could participate in the coveted fifth-grade field trip, but the district’s attorney allegedly told her that Jacob would need to be searched every day and complete coursework that Sollars believes “would violate Jacob’s IEP [Individualized Educational Plan].”
Emails between the district, the Sollars, and their attorney confirm these communications.
“My kid is not a threat. This [was] retaliation because you know he was assaulted,” Sollars said.
Although her son had persistent issues focusing in class, Sollars claimed that Jacob never had a disciplinary record before she began challenging officials about her son’s assault.
The Level Three complaint, formally heard by McKinney ISD’s school board on September 5, was denied in a closed-door hearing. According to Sollars, only Trustee Chad Green voted in her favor.
The Sollars family has a pending due process complaint before the Texas Education Agency. All three of the Sollars children are now homeschooled because of Jacob’s experiences and Sollars’s concerns about further retaliation.
“When we first started, all we wanted was for that girl to be moved to a different campus, [or] she should have been put in [Disciplinary Alternative Education Program] for an assault. That is all that their policies say. That is all we had been arguing for,” Sollars said.
However, as this situation escalated, Sollars said that Jacob felt no one cared about him and did not feel safe.
Mediation ultimately failed in June, and all the Sollars’ requests were denied.
Each member of the McKinney ISD was contacted during the production of this story, and together, they issued a statement of “no comment.”
Trustee Chad Green briefly discussed the case during the September 5 school board meeting.
“I think there was retribution that took place. … I’ve heard this story from so many parents. I think the board, we need to have a meeting about this,” Green said.
The cases he was referring to likely include an email exchange Sollars obtained where at least one other parent claimed to have had similar experiences to Jacob just weeks before his assault and another contemporaneous occurrence where a student was hospitalized from an alleged bullying incident and the student’s mother accused the district of retaliation.
During procedural motions to deny the grievance, Trustee Stephanie O’Dell said, “I just wanted to add that the TEA investigation showed that there was no wrongdoing on our part.”
Trustee Amy Dankel, who introduced the motion, said part of the board’s decision to deny was based on the fact that Jacob was no longer a McKinney ISD student. Later, she added that if Jacob ever re-enrolled in the district, they would consider a process allowing him to transfer schools.
Emails from a police detective indicate that a case regarding Jacob’s assault may now be headed to a grand jury.