Georgia Teacher Sh*tcanned For Reading Picture Book About Getting Along With Each Other

Oh no it's more LGBTQ+ propaganda!

A Georgia elementary school teacher has been put on administrative leave — on track to be fired pending a "termination tribunal" scheduled for August 3 — after she read her class a picture book that very gently challenges gender norms and had her fifth-graders discuss how we're all different but that makes life more fun. You can see why she had to go.

Katie Rinderle, who teaches gifted elementary schoolers at Due West Elementary School in Cobb County, picked up a copy of My Shadow is Purple by Australian author Scott Stuart at a school book fair, along with several other picture books, and had her students pick which of the new additions to her classroom library they'd like her to read aloud to them.

The kids chose My Shadow, which is a friendly little nonbinary rhyming fable about a kid who likes a lot of things boys like and a lot of things girls like, and attends their school dance in a suit-and-skirt combo that their mum and dad both helped make. There, all the other kids seem neatly divided into those with "blue" shadows, and those with "pink" shadows, so the dejected kid starts to leave, until other kids reveal that their shadows are orange or red or green or — in a redundancy that we must demand the author explain — "violet." Everybody dances and is happy. Nobody says anything about genitals, demands the dismantling of the patriarchy, or even holds hands, yucccch. (And despite our description of the plot, there aren't even any nonbinary pronouns. It's about as radical as Rosie Grier singing "It's All Right to Cry." Oh wait. Guess thatis radical now.)

As the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, Rinderle followed the reading with a discussion about self-acceptance and diversity and all that hippie stuff, and then then the real indoctrination got rolling:

The students reflected upon how they, as academic achievers, are often perceived as different from their peers. They discussed the importance of recognizing and accepting people as individuals. And they expressed how supported the main character must have felt when they found friends that accepted them and valued them for their differences and uniqueness.

Rinderle then asked her students to self-reflect and write a “shadow” poem.

Their reflections were personal, profound, neither divisive nor aimed at others. “My shadow is white, an underestimated thing,” one student wrote. “When mixed with colors, it can do amazing things but left by itself it’s kinda bland.” Another wrote, “My shadow is purple and now I do know that everyone’s different and not to be woe [sic] when my heart glows and tells me to see it’s fine to be me.”

So yeah, kids can be pretty wonderful, and then within the month, Rinderle was given the choice of resigning or being fired, and she insisted she'd done nothing wrong. In fact, when her school principal asked to see the book she'd read, she was happy to share it because she liked it so much, as she explains in this video:  

 youtu.be 

The SPLC says it appears Rinderle is the first teacher to be given their walking papers

under Georgia’s trio of censorship laws passed in 2022. They are the Protect Students’ Rights Act, commonly known as the “divisive concepts” law; a “Parents’ Bill of Rights;” and one known as the “harmful to minors law,” which allows for the removal or restriction of materials parents deem “pornographic” or otherwise harmful. Together, the laws censor class discussion, give parents the right to refuse instruction they disagree with and ban “offensive” reading materials from school libraries. If Rinderle’s experience is any indication, she will not be the last to be terminated, advocates say.

Rinderle is now fighting her termination with help from her union, the Georgia Association of Educators, and a private attorney, Craig Goodmark. Goodmark told the Atlanta Journal-Constitutionthat administrators told Rinderle she had violated Georgia's "divisive concepts" law , aka SB 377, which is kind of weird since it's one of those cookie-cutter laws prohibiting very bad teachings about race and inequality in America. As the Journal-Constitution notes, the very broad (and probably unconstitutionally vague) list of very bad concepts focuses on race, although it "included a passage about transgender athletes," so presumably that's the pretext for firing Rinderle.

Previously!

 Georgia Schoolchildren Will Just Have To Learn All History From Confederate Statues 

 Black Lady Got School Job In Georgia, And The White Parents Went Wilding 

Goodmark added that Rinderle wasn't told specifically how she had supposedly broken the law. Oh, hey, maybe some idiot decided the various-colored shadows were about race-mixing! It also occurs to us that the book's use of Aussie spellings like colours might poison young minds.

The AJC passes along a remarkably vague, passive-aggressive statement from the Cobb County School District, explaining that Rinderle's pending termination is

“appropriate considering the entirety of the teacher’s behavior and history.” The statement did not elaborate except to say that the district remained “committed to strictly enforcing all” school board policies and the law.

Wow, the "entirety of the teacher's behavior and history." Bet she conducts regular flag-burnings in class, or encourages children to think critically.

Cobb County, you may recall, is one of two school districts where rightwing white parents harassed a Black educator out of jobs because they'd decided she was a radical Marxist Critical Race Theorist who wanted to turn all the children into gay transgender revolutionaries and probably readers of books, too. So that's some coincidence!

Also too, the AJC reports that, according to Jeff Hubbard, president of the Cobb County Association of Educators, the complaint about Rinderle arose from just one parent, who's also a teacher in the district. Hubbard fears that Rinderle's career could be ruined by the extremely vague laws she's accused of violating by reading a book aloud.

He described her as an “exemplary” teacher and predicted a backlash from her colleagues. They were just beginning to react Thursday on a Facebook page restricted to Cobb teachers.

“Absolutely insane,” wrote one in a post that Hubbard read aloud. Another: “When did teachers become the enemy?”

Oh, that last one's easy: Teachers have always been the enemy of pigheaded bigots, from the Scopes trial to the Red Scare of the '50s, to the South's Massive Resistance to Brown v. Board , to the Satanic Panic, the panic over "secular humanism," and every last rightwing culture war right up to the latest iterations being driven by Fox News and the Republican Party.

And here's hoping that Georgia's censorship law, and the rest of them from Florida to Idaho, will be stomped out by the courts and by ordinary parents who are sick and tired of seeing American democracy being ruined by rightwing Christian Nationalists.

[ SPLC / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Georgia SB377 ]

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