Sarah Inama is a sixth grade school teacher in the West Ada school district, which includes parts of Boise and is the largest school district in Idaho. She put up the “Everyone is welcome here” poster on the wall of her classroom. The school board ordered her to take it down because The district claims these signs violate policy requiring classroom content to be neutral.
You read that right. “Everyone is welcome” is no longer considered to be a neutral expression.
Idaho teacher ordered to remove "Everyone is welcome here" sign from classroom because it's "a personal opinion"
According to Inama, school officials informed her that the signs were considered personal opinions in today's political climate. "They told me that they were in violation of district policy because in today's political environment they're considered a personal opinion," Inama stated.
The teacher initially complied but later replaced the signs, believing they represented core values of public education. In response, district officials cited both internal policy and Idaho's Dignity and Nondiscrimination in Public Education Act as justification for the removal.
Read that last sentence again. Saying that everyone is welcome is somehow a violation of the “dignity and nondiscrimination” law.
Maybe it was because the hands were all different skin tones. Oops.
Ms. Imana has taught world civilization to 6th graders at Lewis and Clark Middle School for four years. You would think a poster saying everyone is welcome would be an advertisement for world civilization. But according to the school board, you would be wrong. “President Musk” has been quite clear about that. Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Empathy, he said, has been “weaponized.”
This story (which started yesterday) is spreading (there’s even a GoFundMe set up already, though I’m not linking to it; it seems the funder wants money to make T-shirts). No word yet on further action by the teacher (other than that she put the posters back up) or the school board. But even if the board backs down, this is still an ominous sign of Things to Come.
