Within days of graduation, Berkeley High School students are being asked to return their yearbooks after administrators at the California school discovered offensive language on the annual’s pages.

The language refers to the high school’s Academy of Medicine and Public Service — a college preparatory program with a student body that is predominately African America and Latino — as “making our future doctors, dentists, nurses, physicians, fire chiefs and trash collators of tomorrow.”

Instead of  “trash collators” — a term some say is a reference to garbage collectors— the phrase was originally intended to say “innovators of tomorrow,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

According to a tweet from the school’s black student union, the Academy of Medicine and Public Service is “a small school that is predominately people of color.”

“I feel like the garbage collector was in a way trying to attack colored people,” said Jace White, a senior at AMPS, told the CBS affiliate KPIX.

School officials told KPIX that the phrasing was changed without approval before 1,200 books went to print. Nearly 200 of those books were distributed to the student body, according to the station.

“It’s actually a prank,” Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan said. “We confirmed it’s absolutely a prank. Someone went in, changed the text.”

Once returned, school officials plan to cover the offensive language with a sticker bearing the correct phrasing, according to KPIX.

In a statement e-mailed to the student body, Berkeley High principal Kristin Glenchur called the phrase “offensive and racist,” according to the Daily Californian. Glenchur also said distribution of the yearbook would be put on hold until the language is removed.

“What occurred does not just affect the AMPS community, but has had a profound and hurtful impact on all of us,” the statement said.

Berkeley High School students said they felt like the language as venomous and designed to attack minorities.

“People are ignorant and disrespectful,” Jannya Solwazi, a Berkeley High sophomore, told KPIX 5. “When is it going to stop?  It’s hurtful.”

“I have to fight so hard every day because of the color of my skin,” she added. “No matter how successful we’ve become, we are constantly reminded that because the color of our skin, we’re seen as less than.  And that’s not okay.”

Members of the yearbook staff have apologized for not catching the error before it went to print, according to the Daily Californian.

School officials, meanwhile, told KPIX they have opened an investigation of the incident and hope to determine who is responsible for inserting the language into the annual keepsake.

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