We’ve been writing about harassment in schools for three decades now. How long will we keep on?

As long as angry mothers call us, like one did this month.

As long as children cry when they suffer taunts.

“It makes me feel like they’re trying to separate us,” 12-year-old Amyah Trossbach told our Hilltown reporter, Marcello Iaia. “Like they don’t like us because of our color...”

She has been a student at Berne-Knox-Westerlo for a year and a half, and suffered incidents of harassment throughout that time. Amyah is wise beyond her years. She went on, “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.”

Amyah was called a word that packs more punch than any other slur: Nigger. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, wrote a book by that name in which he traced the word’s evolution from a descriptive term meaning black that took on a derogatory connotation over time but is now used, among some African Americans, as a sign of affection.

That was not how the word was used when it was hurled at Amyah. It was used as a brutal weapon. “Nigger as a harbinger of hatred, fear, contempt, and violence remains current, to be sure,” Kennedy wrote. He also stated, “To be ignorant of its meaning and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one’s life.”

More than a dozen years ago, Helen Lounsbury, then a fourth-grade teacher, since retired, heard the racial epithet hurled on a BKW playground, and decided to do something about it.  She applied for a grant and, with other teachers, set up an exchange program with Giffen Memorial Elementary School on South Pearl Street in Albany. She bridged a cultural divide.

The nearly all-white kids from the rural Hilltowns became pen pals with the nearly all-black kids from the inner city. They wrote to each other, they visited each other, they created art together. “Our goal,” said third-grade teacher Martha Iannacone, “was not only to involve four classes from both schools but to raise the consciousness levels of both communities.”

“We’ve learned a lot from each other, things we never expected to learn,” said Lounsbury.

“The basic idea...is that we’re all basically alike,” said second-grade teacher Mary Bichteman. “The world would be a better place if we understood each other.”

Paul Kenific, a BKW elementary school student at the time, may have said it best: “I love to write my pen pal. I bet he is so cool. My pen pal’s name is Jahkeem Jackson. I like him as a good friend....”

Students graduate; school staff retires or moves on. Lessons, even important ones, can be ephemeral. They may stay with the students who learned them but, for harassment to be curbed, there must be consistency. Clear policies must be set in place, and enforced, to create a culture that respects diversity.

We know school leaders have a difficult job — and it is particularly tough at a district like BKW where there has been such widespread and long-term turnover in leadership. We can imagine administrators must feel like battlefield surgeons having to triage patients. With so many needs — from falling test scores to budget cutbacks — what gets tended to first?

This should. This must.

But not a single BKW administrator returned our reporter’s repeated calls this week or last.

It would be easy to think what Amyah suffered is an isolated incident or two, just one child. But that child matters and, in meeting her needs, in ensuring her safety and well being, a clear message will be sent.

The problem, of course, is not peculiar to BKW. Intolerance is everywhere. We’ve written about bullying — from fistfights to cyberspace — in all the districts we cover. Anti-bullying campaigns are popular from the federal level to the local level. The Albany County District Attorney has one, stating words can hurt or words can heal; students who help are pictured on his website and prizes are offered for their efforts.

There is certainly no harm in rewarding good deeds and holding up helpful kids as models but more consistency is needed.  The Guilderland School District focused on prevention in 2003 after two African-American students were arrested for assault; they had gotten in a fight with a white student who had made threats and called them “nigger.” The white student was not charged.

“You have a perpetrator who became a victim and a victim who became a perpetrator,” Stephen Wessler told us at the time; he wrote the book “The Respectful School” and was director of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Crime. Harassment frequently escalates to violence in schools, he said, adding that the focus should be on prevention.

Guilderland launched an anti-bullying campaign and surveyed its students. As the community reacted — aghast that over a quarter of Guilderland students said they were afraid of bullying some of the time, and nearly a third reported that staff intervened in bullying only “once in a while” or “almost never” — we noted those trends, while troubling, were not particular to the Guilderland schools but are pervasive in our society. Defining the problem was a brave first step.

In 2011, results of another survey showed about a third of Guilderland’s students had been bullied and about twice that number witnessed bullying, which peaked in middle school, also a national trend.

The solution was embedded in the survey results, just waiting to be unleashed. More than half the students reported feeling sorry for the victims of bullying and wanting to help; similarly, 44 percent reported actually trying to help.

Students must be taught to speak up when they see bullying; bystanders can turn the tide. Then school leaders must follow through in backing up the brave bystanders and working to teach those who bully about the harm it causes.

There may be racist families that are raising children who feel justified in using slurs. But schools should be a safe place where those prejudices are not allowed to find expression.

One of our favorite books is Mark Twain’s “Hucklebury Finn,” an American classic. Twain writes in his autobiography of the boy on which he modeled Huck: “He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.” Heart. Heart is what matters in Twain’s hero — and in life. Twain said he portrayed Huck as having “sound heart and a deformed conscience.”

As Amyah talked to our reporter last week, her mother listened, turning the hurt into a lesson for her daughter. When Amyah said that, regardless of skin color, everyone has the same personality, her mother interjected, “Not personality — insides, heart.”

Huck makes a journey in the book — not just on the river but an internal journey — where he learns to trust his heart over the conscience Southern white society in that era had given him. When he is asked early on if the explosion of a steamboat boiler hurt anyone, Huck answers, “No’m, killed a nigger.”

We should recoil when we read those words. They capture the ugliness of a society that doesn’t recognize people as human. Huck becomes a hero because he discards his “deformed conscience,” the moral code by which he was raised, in order to help Jim in his escape from slavery. Huck accepts Jim and cares about him even though it means, in the constructs of his society, going to Hell.

Maybe a school can’t change the conscience of a child warped by racism but at the very least it can require tolerance for others. School leaders can, and must, insist on outward signs of respect, and maybe the inward changes will come. Maybe the taunting students will find their heart.

In the meantime, at least one little girl won’t come home in tears.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer