Elementary teacher suspended after bragging about making a classroom for 'non-white students'

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A Utah teacher who bragged about building her elementary classroom for “nonwhite students” has been suspended and put on paid leave. 

In a video that was posted on her social media account, the teacher, who remains unnamed, claimed, “For the first time in my life, I'm going to be teaching at a majority-white school, and I'm kind of interested to see how students and parents react to my classroom, or if they even notice anything about it, because it's built for nonwhite students.” 

The video went viral after it was highlighted on Twitter. 

This 4th grade teacher @WilliamPennEl explains that her classroom “is built for non-white students.” pic.twitter.com/jttAA1VWqy

— 👁 Inside The Classroom (@EITC_Official) August 20, 2022

According to the local news site KSL.com, the teacher, who was newly-hired to teach fourth grade at the William Penn Elementary School in the Granite School District in Utah, was placed on leave after school administrators learned of her video. 

A spokesman for the school district said that the teacher's comments “are very disconcerting and she has been placed on leave while the district investigates the matter.” 

“It would be in violation of our district policies and state board rule to teach anything other than the approved curriculum and standards or to discriminate against any student. As soon as our investigation is complete, we anticipate taking appropriate corrective action. We know that our role as educators is to support parents and the families we serve and we value our parents and their engagement in our schools and classrooms,” the statement continued. 

According to the district, other grade-level teachers and long-term substitute teachers are now covering her classes. 

The school district said the video was posted in July and only recently came to the administrators’ attention. In the video, the teacher also discusses her classroom materials and the books she put in the classroom library. 

“If you look around and you interact with some of the materials I have, you'll notice that there's like, no white kids represented in that,” she says in the video. "So just on like that, that very first level of multicultural education, and I don't think, like, my new students will mind, but you know, not a single white face there.” 

The teacher goes on to explain how she has a big stack of colouring pages “and not a single one with a person on it depicts a white person or character.” 

The teacher insisted that literature “is kind of dominated by straight, cis-white men,” so several titles in her library reflect that, adding that “it is overpowered now from all the books that I've been purchasing to add on to my library that depict a lot of diverse peoples, whether that's people of color, or have like books or nonbinary, trans, otherwise LGBTQ characters.”  

“There's just not a lot of adherence to the status quo on just that like base level of my classroom. So I'm kind of wondering if I feel like some parents might have something to say about that. If my experience with posh white parents in the past holds true for this year, we'll see,” she said. 

The school district said it will continue its investigation into the teacher and has not provided an estimate of how long it will take. 

The school district said that it wants to ensure that every student “feels welcome and is not discriminated against in any way, shape or form, that every child is brought into a welcoming and safe environment.”