Here’s an interesting one for you. A teacher in Escambia County, Florida, resigned this week after allegedly dealing with racist conduct on the part of another school district employee. Now, progressives are using this story to launch a rather dubious attack on the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits the teaching of far-leftist ideas on race in K-12 schools.
The Pensacola News Journal reported that teacher Michael James sent an email to Gov. Ron DeSantis and Escambia County Superintendent Tim Smith claiming that a district employee “removed pictures of historic Black American heroes from his classroom walls, citing the images as being ‘age inappropriate.’”
James had put up images of notable black Americans like Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Colin Powell, and George Washington Carver in his classroom. It was these pictures that the other employee allegedly took issue with.
From the report:
James chose the board’s theme because the majority of the students and the residents in the neighborhoods that surround O.J. Semmes are Black, and he wanted to motivate his students with inspirational leaders they could easily look up to and see themselves.
James, 61, of Daphne, Alabama, sent his letter to the governor Monday night. He officially resigned from his position as an exceptional student education teacher at O.J. Semmes Elementary School on Tuesday morning.
The school district issued a statement acknowledging the matter and explaining it would be conducting an investigation.
The teacher – who happens to be white – said he could not work for a school that would support this type of behavior. “I hate to say this about everybody in the staff or the leadership there, but something is not right,” he said. “Something needs to be changed or fixed.”
James explained that on Monday, the district employee, who is a behavior analyst, entered his classroom to help him set it up.
“That is kind of unusual, but that’s OK,” James thought. “They came in, and we started moving tables around and swapping some out, and I had made the bulletin board a couple of days earlier.”