The Winooski School District took down its website and disconnected many of its office phones Monday after receiving what its superintendent described as a flood of racist and violent messages in response to the district’s decision to raise a Somali flag.
Many of the messages appear to be part of a coordinated effort to target the district, where about 9% of students are Somali, spurred by prominent right-wing social media accounts, according to Wilmer Chavarria, the Winooski schools superintendent.
The district was forwarding messages it received on Monday to state law enforcement officials. A spokesperson for the Vermont State Police said investigators had been sent more than 200 such messages as of Monday afternoon and said their content so far appeared to be part of a “coordinated national campaign” against the district.
So far, none of the messages state investigators had reviewed seemed to present a credible threat of violence, Adam Silverman, the state police spokesperson, said in an email.
District leaders hosted a Somali flag-raising ceremony on Friday at the city’s combined elementary, middle and high school campus. The district later posted images and a video of the event, showing some of the students attending it, to its social media feeds.
The flag-raising was one of several actions the district has planned to show support for its Somali community in response to President Donald Trump’s tirade last week during a Cabinet meeting against Somali people living in Minnesota, according to Chavarria.
Trump called Somalis “garbage” that he said he did not want to have in the country and later ordered immigration agents into Minnesota. Officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security then touted the arrest of several Somali men, calling them the “worst of the worst.” The president has pointed to a sweeping fraud scandal in Minnesota that prosecutors allege largely involved Somali people as a justification for his actions.
“It’s almost marching orders for a large part of the U.S. population to go and harass our community,” Chavarria said, of the president’s comments, in an interview.
Starting Monday morning, the Winooski School District’s phone lines started “blowing up,” Chavarria said. He said some people were calling district employees the N-word, among other offensive names. Some calls included phrases such as “We’re coming for you. You don’t know what’s coming. You’re about to find out,” he said.
The messages coincided with posts on a number of popular right-wing social media pages that included the video of the flag-raising, contact information for the district and photos of its school board members, Chavarria said. He said he believed the posts were the reason for the sudden onslaught of calls, as well as a torrent of emails.
The video being spread online shows only a Somali flag, which Chavarria said seems to have given the false impression that the school was flying it in place of a U.S. flag. He said that notion was reflected in the messages district employees received Monday.
In a post to its own social media feeds Monday, the district said it wanted “to assure our community” that the Somali flag was being flown on one of three flagpoles outside the city’s school, next to a U.S. flag and Vermont flag. The U.S. flag “remains in its proper place at the highest point,” the post stated. It also said the Somali flag would be flown for only one week.
As of Monday afternoon, posts were visible on the X accounts “End Wokeness” and “Libs of TikTok,” which together have more than 8 million followers, including the video of the flag-raising and text directing followers to call the school district’s central office.
Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump political commentator with 4 million X followers who is a former executive at Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, shared the flag-raising video Monday with the message, “I’ve got a suggestion for ICE’s next stop.”
(Federal immigration agents have already arrested immigrants living in Winooski, though the city, like the rest of the state, has not been the focus of one of Trump’s large-scale enforcement operations such as those in Los Angeles or New York.)
“It’s pretty scary,” Chavarria said. But he said he and other district leaders think the reaction to the flag-raising shows the importance of the action in the first place.
“It’s given us even more of a mission to continue doing the right thing,” he said. “Because if they are willing to attack our employees to that extent, I don’t want to find out what they’re willing to do to our most vulnerable students in the building who just happen to be of a different color, speak a different language, have a different family story.”
Chavarria said the district had police patrolling its school Monday and that staff planned to take additional precautions such as keeping close tabs on students when they were outside.
On Monday afternoon, the Winooski schools’ website directed users to a page stating the site was offline while staff “address and mitigate an unprecedented volume of illegitimate traffic targeting our services.”
The district was slated to host another gathering for its Somali community on Monday afternoon as part of its response to Trump’s comments last week, Chavarria said.
