A student-created haunted house at Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo was closed permanently on Friday after complaints that part of the display — a doll with a black head and a white body hanging from a rope — was racially offensive.

“It’s certainly not something the district condones,” said Tamalpais High School District Superintendent David Yoshihara. “I do regret the offense and pain this has caused for our community.”

The superintendent said the display was finished on Wednesday by the communications academy on campus and opened to the student body on Thursday.

Marin City activist Felecia Gaston, who is African American and grew up in the segregated South, said she was “stunned” when a black student at Drake showed her a photo of the doll.

“The disgusting part was the hanging, the lynching,” Gaston said. “Being from the South, I found it not to be in good taste.” She commended the school and the district for taking quick action to shut it down.

Yoshihara said the Halloween theme of the exhibit was “Haunted Hospital,” and the black head on a white body was intended to represent a patient who had been burned, not a lynching.

“At its core, the issue here is not one of malicious intent but rather a lack of cultural awareness and understanding of historical context,” Drake Principal Liz Seabury said in a prepared statement. “It is an opportunity for us to stop what we are doing and be thoughtful about how we comfort the students who have been offended and guide our whole student community through this deeply upsetting occurrence.”

Heather Graves was one member of the community who was upset by the display, as was her 16-year-old niece, a mixed race student who sent her a video of the haunted house.

“For me, with everything that’s been going on, I don’t know where the supervision was,” Graves said. “My niece was extremely upset about it. This is Marin, we have zero tolerance for things like this.”

Not everyone felt that way. In an email to the Drake principal and the district superintendent, parent Lisa Macdonald opposed the closure, saying there since there was no racist motive behind it, shutting it down was unfair to the students who created it.

“There is absolutely no way that these children were thinking any negative thoughts when setting up the displays,” Macdonald wrote. “There isn’t anything in the world where you cannot find something to make some correlation to or turn into a negative event in our history if you look hard enough. When does it stop and when does our society finally put an end to it? This would be a travesty to punish the kids in this way.”

Principal Seabury said the Drake administration is offering support and counseling to any students who may request it.

“We strive to create a culturally-inclusive and responsive environment on our school sites, but we are far from perfect and this incident demonstrates the need for us to redouble our efforts to ensure our schools are welcoming and safe spaces for everyone,” she said. “The haunted house has been closed and will not reopen this year due to a prop used that deeply offended many people who attended, most specifically our students of color and their families.”