BERNE — Twelve-year-old Amyah Trossbach’s favorite activity at Berne-Knox-Westerlo is in her technology class where she gets to use saws to cut wood.

She’s working on a project where students form letters of their choice. Amyah is cutting wood to spell “Drama,” and she plans to hang the word in the hallways of the secondary school, which is home to seventh grade, hers, through 12th grade.

The word has hung in her own mind as several times in the year-and-a-half she has been at BKW she has been harassed or threatened by students in the social trauma common to middle school, but compounded by its focus on her light-brown skin.

Amyah’s father is black and her mother is white. In her school, where 1 percent of students are black, peers in heated exchanges have called her “nigger.”

On March 3, she stuck up for a friend. She told the boy who exchanged punches with her friend to leave him alone, she recalled; he responded by calling her the racial slur, and they went back and forth in the cafeteria afterward, with Amyah using her middle finger and the boy using the slur. Her mother, Donna Parker, said the boy was given in-school suspension.

“There’s a kid in my bus, he tells me that he and his grandfather are racist so he has the right to call me the ‘N’ word and black,” said Amyah.

In Amyah’s telling, another boy, who wanted to date her when she was in sixth grade, used the slur after she said she didn’t want to go out with him.

“Last year, on the school bus, the first six months in school, she was being told by two high schoolers, 16 and older, ‘You’re a nigger. You need to go back to where you came from,’” her mother, Donna Parker, said.

A meeting was called with administrators to talk about the bus atmosphere, which Parker said resulted in the driver losing his job. But she was frustrated when, instead of getting a call from the school, she first learned about the March 3 exchange Amyah had with the boy in the cafeteria by reading a post her niece had put on Facebook.

When she confronted the interim assistant Principal Annette Landry, who is a guidance counselor at the school, Parker said she was told that she didn’t get a call sooner because staff had been so preoccupied with a fight between two girls that day.

On Thursday that week, Interim Principal Mary Summermatter sent a form home with Amyah, which Parker used to file a formal report with the State Education Department. Such an option came to parents in 2012, when the Dignity for All Students Act went into effect to declare students’ right to have an education free from discrimination, harassment, and bullying.

In a collection of data from 2014 required under the Dignity for All Students Act, Berne-Knox-Westerlo, considered an average-needs district — not poor, but not wealthy — reported one instance of discrimination or harassment based on race and one based on an ethnic group. In total, it reported 21 discrimination or harassment incidents at the secondary school, with 16 categorized as “other,” and none in the elementary school.

Amyah says she has gone to administrators several times, but students continue to use the slur against her and others. She said she now reports racist taunts to a guidance counselor, Darnell Douglas, who is also black and has been at BKW for about as long as Amyah.

Addressed about how he handled Amyah’s reports, former Principal Brian Corey, who is now a superintendent at another district, wrote in an email that her claim that he at first did not believe her was not accurate and directed further questions to Berne-Knox-Westerlo staff.

Messages left for administrators — Interim Superintendent Joe Natale, Summermatter, elementary Principal Audrey Roettgers, and Landry — at BKW were not returned.

Parker said she has had to call the school several times before getting a call back.

“I get it, there are racist families wherever you go, but normally, when something’s going on at school and you complain about it, normally it gets taken care of,” said Parker.

The stress at school sometimes builds up for weeks, Parker said, and Amyah will one day be in tears.

Another parent, of a black student called “nigger” and “black terd” in school, believes the racist comments are part of a larger problem of bullying and aggression in the district, which stems from a small group of students in the middle grades.

The Enterprise is withholding that parent’s name due to the gravity of the situation.

The district has had high turnover in its leadership, now with its second interim superintendent in two years and an interim principal filling in this year at the secondary school. BKW had had a dean of students to handle discipline, but that duty is now handled by an assistant principal, occupied temporarily by a guidance counselor.

“The kids know there’s no structure,” said the unnamed parent.

Before BKW, Amyah attended school in Greenville, just south of the Hilltowns, in Greene County. Amyah said she didn’t hear the slur at Greenville, where she studied from first to fifth grades; black students make up the same percentage of enrollment as BKW, according to State Education Department data for the 2013-14 school year.

Among BKW’s 855 students last year, seven were classified as black; seven as multiracial; 10 as Latino; five as Asian or Pacific Islander; and 824, or 96 percent, as white. Out of the seven black students, six were considered economically disadvantaged. Three of them were in sixth grade, with the rest spread throughout the upper grades.

When asked what the word “nigger” means, Amyah said that other students use it to say someone is ignorant or has dark skin.

“My nickname used to be ‘Little Niggie,’” Amyah said, explaining that, when her BKW friends were seeking a nickname for her, she believed they were thinking of her skin. “I was fine with that. I picked it out, I was fine, but, when they actually called me the full name as non-joke, just to make me feel hurt inside, then I get mad. But Mom told me I had to get my name changed to ‘Little Chi Chi.’”

Amyah said she tries to ignore comments about race, but acknowledged she has reacted angrily when her black friends are called the slur.

“It makes me feel like they’re trying to separate us,” said Amyah. “Like they don’t like us because of our color, not because of our humor, not because we like math, not because we like school, or because we hate a certain person. I think they’re just trying to make us feel bad, make us want to go away. They don’t like us because of our color, but there’s nothing different except for our skin.”

She went on, saying everyone has the same personality, then she stopped herself and her mother corrected her: “Not personality — insides, heart,” said Parker.