The Portland school board recently voted not to fire a black teacher with a history of misconduct — because he’s black. Dance teacher Damon Keller repeatedly was cited for calling in sick to avoid school, when he actually was giving private lessons, reports the Daily Mail.
Keller also went to North Carolina to judge a dance contest despite his travel request being turned down by school officials.
The Oregonian reports that Keller “has also been dogged by disciplinary issues in the past seven years” including “physical misconduct involving students.” The Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission put him on probation for two years in 2021.
Despite all this, last month the school board voted 4-3 to retain Keller. Board member Julia Brim-Edwards, who provided the deciding vote, made clear that she voted the way she did because of Keller’s race. She said that Keller “is a Black teacher in a school with a very diverse set of students. That did inform my point of view.”
Board member Michelle DePass specifically cited racial reasons for voting against terminating Keller, who, like her, is black.
The district has been documenting Keller for eight years…They’ve been waiting for him to mess up. I have never experienced a white person being scrutinized like that over that length of time and then dismissed. We shouldn’t hold black people to a higher standard of conduct than everyone else. …
We need to be applying our discipline policies equally, to everyone. We always say, ‘Oh, we need more Black teachers.’ But we have to retain the people we have. Let’s lovingly work with the people we have.
DePass sees racism everywhere, even in innocuous things. In 2021, DePass delayed a school board vote on a new high school mascot — an evergreen tree — because she believed it had “racist connotations” (to her, a tree necessarily symbolized the lynching of black Americans).
The other black members of the school board, along with Julia Brim-Edwards who is white, joined DePass in voting in favor of Keller.
Andrew Scott, one of the three who voted against retaining Keller, said DePass’s comments “created a future lawsuit.” He added “I have never heard comments that race-based in this type of a setting … it was extraordinarily troubling.”
Critics have focused on DePass’s comments, but oddly, not Brim-Edwards’, whose comments even more clearly favored Keller based on race. DePass would no doubt claim she was motivated by a desire to prevent racism, rather than being racist. The reality is that a white teacher with as long a disciplinary record as Keller would have likely have been fired, with DePass’s approval, but that is not absolutely certain, and while DePass likely applied a racial double standard, proving that might require factual digging.
By contrast, Brim-Edwards’ explanation for her vote that Keller “is a Black teacher” and that that “informed” her “point of view” is clearer proof that Keller’s race was a deciding factor in the board’s 4-to-3 vote not to fire him.
