Three middle school students in a predominantly white suburb of northern California flashed a gesture associated with white supremacy in a basketball team photo, prompting the school to correct the yearbook which contained the photo.

The students involved at Kenilworth junior high school claimed innocence after a parent flagged the photo to the school district, saying they were merely playing the “circle game” – in which one person holds their hand in the same upside-down “OK” gesture to get another person’s attention.

But the fact that a hand symbol which began as a fake troll by 4chan is now being picked up by children raises the question of what educators and parents should do when the lines are blurred for some but the meaning clear for too many – in particular for people of color.

“It doesn’t matter what their intent was,” said Dave Rose, the assistant superintendent of student services of the Petaluma school district, where the incident took place. “It has impact. That’s our jobs as adults, as parents, and as educators: to make sure our youth are learning these lessons.”

The school principal asked parents to tell children to turn in their yearbooks so administrators could cover the offensive version with sticker paper containing an edited version.

The Kenilworth junior high yearbook is not an isolated incident. School students in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago managed to sneak the same hand gesture into 18 photos of their yearbook.

At Oak Park and River Forest high school in Oak Park, Illinois, the school was forced to reprint its yearbook entirely after an unknown number of students of “various races, ethnicities, genders, and grades” using that same hand gesture made it into the final product. At the Illinois schools, too, some students claimed to have been playing the “circle game”.

In a letter on the website, the district’s superintendent Joylynn Pruitt-Adams wrote: “Many students, not only our students of color, experience this gesture as a symbol of white supremacy. Potentially subjecting our students to this trauma is simply not acceptable.”

But she also noted that she was “not making any presumptions about students’ intent in using the gesture” and part of the reason for shouldering the $53,794 cost to reprint the yearbooks was to protect the students making the hand gestures.

Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance, an educational project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that the focus should be on education rather than discipline.

She said: “They are kids and they have poor judgment. They are at an age when they are trying to figure out who they are and getting attention is part of that. But actions have consequences, and we shouldn’t just focus on their intent, or their youth. We should focus on the impact of what they did.”

Staff at Kenilworth were able to set up a “life skills” discussion for the students before the end of the school year, and plan to take “a big-picture look at these behaviors”, according to principal Bennett Holley.

Rose, of the school district, said: “Those types of discussions are taking place in our classes right now, and it’s part of our curriculum in high school. There are climate and communication and life-skill classes that are taking part in assemblies as well.”

But some have questioned how these photos made it to publication in the first place. Zahyra Garcia, the Sonoma county human rights commissioner, said it’s indicative of a bigger issue – Petaluma, where Kenilworth is located, is 79% white. Oak Park in Illinois is 69% white.

Garcia said: “These are innocent games, these are innocent kids who don’t know anything, but kids of color, our black and brown youth, they’re not afforded the same mentality. If it were the other way around, if it were all brown kids throwing up gang signs, you know the administration would have been on it in seconds. That’s what so’s frustrating about it.”

Garcia is pushing for more education, but also on a staff and teacher level. She said: “We lack representation in our schools. If we had more representation, we wouldn’t be having this problem. More people would be aware, more people would be educated, more people know that regardless of the intent, this is impacting folks of all walks of life.”