VIRGINIA BEACH — On the morning of March 12, a group of Kellam High School friends got together at their usual gathering spot outside the school.

It was one friend’s birthday, and they celebrated by giving him presents before classes began. The gifts included a birthday card with handwritten notes, some candy and a bag of fried chicken. Videos later obtained from school surveillance cameras showed the group hugging and laughing after the gift exchange, according to a lawsuit recently filed in Virginia Beach Circuit Court.

A teacher who witnessed the interaction told Kellam Principal Ryan Schubart about it soon after, the lawsuit said. The concern: The three boys offering the fried chicken were white, while the one receiving it was Black, suggesting a play on a racist stereotype about Blacks and fried chicken.

Soon, the students were brought in for questioning. They told school officials it was all just a joke. The teen celebrating his birthday told them he thought the gift was funny, and said he’d even asked his friends to give him fried chicken, the lawsuit said. Police and prosecutors were notified, but determined no crime had been committed, according to the claim.

Within hours, representatives of the NAACP, school board and community members were contacting the school. The next day, Schubart authorized an email to all parents that described the incident as “racist harassment” and said the students, who weren’t named in the email, would be disciplined “to the fullest extent possible,” the lawsuit said. Local TV reports soon followed.

That was the last day the three teens attended Kellam, and now they have filed a $10 million dollar lawsuit against Schubart. They were suspended from school and they claim that — as a result of the school email and the TV stories that followed — they’ve repeatedly been threatened with bodily harm, stalked, confronted by strangers in a hostile manner and have suffered damage to their property.

A spokesperson for Virginia Beach Public Schools said the district was reviewing the lawsuit with legal counsel. Schubart couldn’t be reached by The Virginian-Pilot and no attorney was listed for him in online court records. Schubart recently was appointed principal of Princess Anne High School, the schools spokesperson said, and the move will become effective July 1.

The students who are suing are not named in the lawsuit to protect them from further damage to their reputations, according to their attorney, Tim Anderson. Though they weren’t named in the email, other students and parents quickly figured out who they were, he said. All three have been homeschooled since their suspension, and do not plan to return to Kellam next year though they’ve been told they can, he said.

“The actions of Ryan Schubart were reckless, defamatory and an outright betrayal of the trust placed in a school principal,” Anderson said in a message to The Pilot. “Mr. Schubart knowingly spread false allegations against minor students — branding them as racists in a narrative he manufactured to appease political pressure. His email to the school community not only disregarded the truth but also destroyed the reputations and futures of innocent children.”

Schubart knew the boy receiving the gift was friends with the others, and wasn’t offended by the gift, yet left that out in investigative reports, the lawsuit said. He also failed to view the video or conduct a reasonable investigation before taking action, the complaint said. And a claim in the email that a teacher immediately intervened when they saw the incident occurring was proven false by the video, Anderson said.

The students’ long-term suspension has put their academic futures in jeopardy, according to the claim, and their rights to due process were denied when they weren’t given a fair and impartial disciplinary hearing.