Yearbook’s fake names target black students at Charter Oak High

Administrators at Charter Oak High School in Covina said they are investigating how a student on the yearbook staff was able to get fake names for Black Student Union members, including “Tay Tay Shaniqua,” “Crisphy Nanos” and “Laquan White,” into the published yearbook.

Calling the incident a “regrettable mistake,” Clint Harwick, superintendent of the Charter Oak Unified School District, said today that school officials had spoken to the student believed to be responsible. Any discipline, he said, would be determined by the outcome of their investigation.

“We’re doing everything we can to remedy the problem. This is not the standard of our yearbook by any means,” Harwick said. He added that he could not understand why the fake names had not been caught in the proofing process.

The school has made stickers with the correct names available for students wishing to cover over the false names.

At the suburban campus, largely empty this morning, Ashley Nolton said the incident was embarrassing. Nolton, who will be a senior in the fall, said she learned of the fake names from news reports.

“It’s disrespectful,” she said. “It gives a bad name to the entire school.”

Nolton said the fact that wrong names had been used on a page for the Black Student Union had apparently had gone unnoticed by most students at the school’s annual yearbook signing party earlier this month.

She said black students, who make up less than 5% of the school’s 2,000 enrollees, “tend to stick together.” But she said she had never witnessed any racial tensions on campus.

Jeff Richards came to the school today to pick up a transcript with his daughter Brittany, who graduated this month. Richards said when he first heard about the fake names, he thought it might be an inside joke by students in the group. Once he realized it was not, he considered the incident unacceptable.

Brittany Richards said she first saw the fake names when a friend pointed the page out to her.

“It’s not a very good thing to do,” she said.

Richards and his daughter said they heard that the responsible student would be a senior this fall and said they believed the person should be barred from the yearbook staff.

Black Student Union members who spoke to the Pasadena Star News called the action “upsetting.”

“Someone was just trying to be funny, but it’s not funny,” said Jordan Smith, a BSU member. ” … It’s a mistake that should not of been overlooked.”

Paisley Moore, another member of the Black Student Union, told the newspaper that the corrective sticker, which school officials said has been used in the past to correct errors in other yearbooks, was insufficient.

“I kind of laughed at it,” she said. “Show that you are sincerely apologetic. I don’t think they realize what happened here.”

 joanna.lin@latimes.com