So... Is Everyone in Fact Welcome in West Ada, Idaho Schools?

Riddle me this, Gentle Reader.  Here are images of two posters.  Here’s #1:

                                

Curmie asks that you pay particular attention to the right side of the poster under the heading “Kind.”  (Curmie apologizes for the reflections showing up in the image, and for the fact that #2 is crooked, but you can clearly see what he wants you to see.)

And here’s #2:

                  

OK.  So.  Poster #1 advocates “welcom[ing] others and embrac[ing] diversity.  Poster #2 says “everyone is welcome here.”  Pretty much the same thing, right?  Apparently not, at least according to the educational power structure in West Ada, Idaho.  (Ada County includes Boise, so its total population is about a half a million people; we are not, as Curmie first assumed, talking about some tiny town somewhere.)

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons.  The difference between the two posters, obviously (insert eye roll here) is that #1 is required in every classroom in the district, and that #2 is forbidden.  Why?  Because the authorities said so, of course.  If you’re looking for a rational reason, you’d better ask someone else, ‘cause Curmie’s got nothin’.

The story goes like this.  Sarah Inama is in her fourth year of teaching World Civilizations at Lewis and Clark Middle School in West Ada.  At least according to reporting by Brian Holmes on a local TV station, Poster #2 has been up in her classroom all along.  But this January the censorial bigots thought control school administration decided they had a problem with it, and insisted she remove it.

It’s a violation of policy, you see.  “In today’s political climate,” it “expresses a personal opinion.”  OK, now, Curmie is a grumpy old fart, and isn’t a fan of cutesy posters, even in a 6^th grade classroom.  But if, in fact, anyone suggests that everyone should not be welcome in a public school classroom, that person should be kept as far as possible away from either students or teachers. 

Saying that everyone is welcome is not, according to the bozos, “content neutral,” but is a “personal opinion.”  You will forgive Curmie, Gentle Reader, if he wonders how welcoming others and embracing diversity is not, therefore, similarly personal.  By the way, no one had complained about those two posters.  The school administration was being pro-actively assholic.  Of course, they presented their inane decision as a means of “protecting” Inama.  If this sounds a little too much like a protection racket to you, you’re not alone.

Ah, but “everyone is welcome here” is not something everyone believes, so that justifies this idiocy.  Curmie notes that not everyone believes the earth is three-dimensional, so having a globe in a world civ classroom would also be problematic.  (Curmie apologizes to the sane people of the West Ada district if he’s given the kakistocracy any ideas.)

Anyway, Inama removed two posters, including #2 above.  The other one, which proclaimed that “in this room, everyone is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued, [and] equal” did it least have each of those words printed on a succession of colors suggestive of the rainbow.  And we know that there’s a subset of conservatives who break out in a rash if someone mentions that famous song Judy Garland sings in “The Wizard of Oz.”  Imana clearly didn’t see a problem with it, but did take it down. 

But after a few days, she emailed her principal and said that the kind of inclusivity suggested by the poster represented “the basis of public education.”  And she put poster #2 back up.  Good for her!  Naturally, the district muckety-mucks then got involved.  Chief Buffoon Academic Officer Marcus Myers quotes a policy proscribing “the advancement of individual beliefs.”  This is the same guy who brags about the relevance of poster #1, by the way.  More on that to come…

Somehow, in what passes for a brain Chez Myers, the Idaho law that requires that teachers “respect the dignity of others, acknowledge the rights of others to express differing opinions,” etc., is somehow violated by a poster that expresses those very thoughts.  To be fair, perhaps Myers isn’t as stupid and hypocritical as he appears: he’s doing the bidding of the board.  So maybe he’s just a coward.

The poster does, of course, highlight different skin colors.  Asked if the “differing view” would therefore be racist, Inama says, 

I can’t even wrap my head around what other ‘differing view’ would be… except for something that’s exclusionary….  This is the one small thing I that I feel like I can do, to speak out against this and stand up for [students], to protect them from being affected by racist sentiments affecting their classroom.

When the TV station reached out to the school district (repeatedly), they got the response that Marcus Myers was “not interested in being interviewed.”  (See above re: cowardice.)  Interestingly that response also included examples of what is allowed, including, for example, “college or professional sports teams.”  So… if you went to the University of Idaho, it’s fine to festoon your classroom with Vandals gear, and the kid whose parents went to Boise State has to deal with it, but tell that kid she’s welcome… OMG, it’ll cause an attack of the vapors.

Naturally, Myers did agree to an interview with The Ranch Podcast, hosted by Matt Todd.  Quoting from the site here: “The Ranch Podcast is supported by Truth In Media Foundation, a non-profit media organization committed to unbiased, Idaho focused media.”  As frequent readers of this blog already know, one of Curmie’s mantras is “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  “Truth in Media” means opinions are masquerading as facts; “unbiased” means “biased as all hell.” 

The Mediabiasfactcheck site rates Truth in Media as a “questionable source” with “low credibility,” “extreme right” bias, “low” factual reporting, and given to “propaganda, conspiracy, fake news, [and] pseudoscience.”  By the way, Curmie checked on that site’s description of a couple of left-biased sites, which are indeed identified as such. 

In other words, Myers agreed to be interviewed by someone he could feel pretty confident would not ask questions he couldn’t answer without revealing himself to be either an idiot or a bigot (not that bigots aren’t also idiots, but you know what Curmie means, Gentle Reader).  Todd pretty much provides him with escape routes, pretending, for example, that it is somehow obvious to everyone, not just racists, that having different skin colors appear on that poster or to anyone but homophobes that multiple colors (not even anything suggestive of a rainbow) somehow make it less inclusive.  Curmie couldn’t agree more with the first comment on that YouTube page: “The goal of this situation seems to be ‘don't offend the racists in Idaho.’”  Thank you, @kristenfrench4732, for that succinct encapsulation.

Questions any truly unbiased interviewer would ask: How, exactly, is poster #2 different in intent from poster #1?  Why would those same words be acceptable if there were no graphic design and they were simply white print on a black background?  How do you respond to the (by now) tens of thousands if not millions of people who think @kristenfrench4732 nailed it?  If there must be a “curricular tie-in” to literally everything, how is, for example, a poster celebrating the Seattle Seahawks allowed?  (Etc.)

The good news here is that this story got a fair amount of play, and there has been a tangible response.  To be fair to Todd, his interview with Alicia Purdy was considerably better than the one with Myers, largely because she actually had something to say.  For example: “Marcus Myers came and said… this actually coincides with our curriculum regarding positive behavior support.  And so, therefore it is tied to the curriculum.  So it does not violate policy under those constraints…. How is welcoming every student dividing our students?” 

When Todd says the problem wasn’t the verbal message but the graphic, she replies, “having that visual of the different skin tones, including white skin tones, that’s important… those students can see that.  Representation matters…. They [students] see the difference in skin tones, so why are we not addressing that?”  Curmie is not generally in the habit of praising someone for making pretty obvious points, but someone had to say all this, so Purdy gets the credit.

Now, apparently, the district is pivoting to claim that the poster’s use of those different-colored hands “aligns with themes commonly associated with DEI initiatives.”  Bullshit.  They’re desperately but unsuccessfully trying to save face.

In fact, the only way to interpret the district’s actions is to recognize that those folks will cheerfully pay lip service to cheery sayings about embracing diversity, as long as they aren’t reminded that there actually is a diverse population out there.  Those who would banish poster #2 are all about welcoming and equality until they actually have to practice it.  Trouble is, claiming to fix a problem while actually making it worse is both inefficient and evil.  If the acronym DOGE just flitted across your mind, Gentle Reader, that’s entirely on you.  😉

Inama has been told she can leave the poster up until the end of the academic year, and then the powers-that-be will ever-so-graciously help her find a suitable replacement.  Perhaps this brouhaha will indeed last that long, but Curmie suspects (or at least hopes) that the district, facing national and even international humiliation, will quietly capitulate, perhaps with the assurance the Inama won’t go public with an announcement of the reversal.

There’s already been a walkout by Renaissance High School students, including some of Inama’s former students, to protest the district’s actions.  A local t-shirt shop is struggling to keep up with orders for shirts depicting the allegedly controversial image; they’re getting orders from all over the country, and had sold over 8,000 shirts as of last Tuesday.  Tomorrow (i.e., Monday the 24^th) there will be a lot of those shirts worn in the hallways and classrooms of West Ada schools.

The most scathing take-down Curmie has seen, though, appears as an editorial by Marty Trillhaase in the Lewiston Tribune.  He argues that the reason to take down the poster is that “[it’s] blatantly false.  Not everyone is welcome in Idaho.” 

He enumerates all the kinds of people who aren’t welcome in the state: essentially anyone who isn’t a cisgendered straight male Protestant.  Physicians and union members are similarly unwelcome.  His chilling conclusion is that “When school resumes next fall, Inama and other Idaho teachers might have to replace that sign with what passes for Idaho’s attitude toward anyone who is different — a bus ticket. “

In other words, the real problem with Inama’s poster for the right-wingers in Idaho is that in her classroom, those words ring true.  And, since their entire weltanschauung is based on hatred, they despise her for that.  Curmie, on the other hand, thinks she’s a bad-ass heroine.