FAIRFIELD (KRON) — Police are investigating a racist threat at Vanden High School in Fairfield. The school was closed Wednesday out of what school officials called an abundance of caution.

At a news conference Wednesday morning, the district’s superintendent said the threat was made toward students at the high school yesterday. The superintendent said officials have since identified students who made the threat and taken disciplinary action.

As the high school deals with the threat of violence, it is also dealing with accusations of racially-motivated incidents on campus.

A family used the threat today to bring to light those separate incidents. By the time Edward Russell Jr. filmed video showing swastikas on the campus and uploaded it to Facebook, the spray painted images near the baseball and softball fields had mostly been removed.

“I’m emotionally spent, I’ve never felt this,” said father Edward Russell.

Russell and his family have involved the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP in this case.

Russell’s 17-year-old son was named in the graffiti discovered on campus March 2.

The family says the students responsible were suspended for five days and allowed to return to school.

“Then on March 20 in the afternoon, my son’s friend was called a monkey by a white student,” Russell said.

The NAACP and the Russell Family say there is a culture of racism at the school and within the Travis Unified School District and that school and district leaders are not properly addressing it.

They say the school district considers this a case of vandalism and not a hate crime.

“To have children subjected to this kind of stress and duress — [this] should not be,” said NAACP Reverend Amos Brown.

Russell says his son is an honor student, having played on the varsity baseball team since his sophomore year and, is two months away from graduation.

He says the student’s who committed the vandalism should have been expelled.

“It hurts my heart that he has to go through this,” the father said. “Now, for the remaining nine weeks, until he graduates, he has to walk to school or around school with his head on a swivel because people that don’t like him because of whatever, because of the color of his skin, they might want to do him some harm. That not fair to him.”

The family says it is keeping the possibility of legal action against the school district and students involved on the table.

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