Did Being Called ‘Woke’ Cost This Iowa Teacher A Principal Job?

In April, a rural Iowa school district was set to hire Leslie Pralle Osborn as the new principal of its two elementary schools. That was until a local resident, who never met Osborn, started a Facebook campaign against her. His reason? He thought Osborn would bring a “woke agenda” to the community.

On April 23, Hampton resident Jacob Swieter wrote several Facebook posts outlining his case against Osborn. This was one day before the Hampton-Dumont School District was set to vote on whether or not to hire Osborn as principal of North Side and South Side elementary schools during a special meeting.

In a since-deleted post, Swieter posted the photos, names, and numbers of all five Hampton-Dumont School Board members—publicly available information that can easily be found on the district’s website—and asked people to call them to ask them to vote “no” on hiring Osborn.

“My personal opinion is we don’t need this woke agenda in our small community,” Swieter wrote in the deleted post. “See previous post for video.”

The video in question, “What My Biracial Daughters Taught Me,” was a 13-minute clip in which Osborn, who is white, explained how she learned more about race, racism, and systemic issues by having two biracial daughters and a Black husband. 

The video was released in August 2020—in the thick of national conversations about race following the murder of George Floyd and ensuing protests—and was part of a virtual education conference presented by the OER Project, an effort that seeks to empower “teachers to better serve their students through free innovative curricula and a variety of teaching tools.”

In his post about the video, Swieter wrote “Hampton elementary hired a new principal. Take a minute to watch the video and get to know your kids knew [sic] authority figure.” Most of the comments under his post are in support of Osborn. 

“What about this video is something you would not want your children to be aware of?,” wrote one commenter.

“I feel she would be amazing for our school district!!!! I talked to her and congratulated her Saturday, she was soooo excited to get started, and now I feel so terrible for her….I think the kids loose [sic] with this as well,” said another commenter.

The video

“I grew up the daughter of a teacher and a farmer in a very white rural Iowa,” Osborn says to open the video.

She goes on to explain how that perspective initially limited her view of the world and how she interacted with it.

“I assumed that the happy sheltered bubble that I lived in was reality,” Osborn said. “I assumed that I treated all my students the same way. I assumed that we lived in an evolved society where color didn’t matter or that racists were the outliers. I assumed that my kids would never deal with major, racially-charged conflicts. And then, in what sometimes seems like the blink of an eye, the happy sheltered bubble I lived in, it popped.”

Osborn shared a story about how her husband was treated by a white bouncer when they tried to go to dinner at a restaurant in Minnesota early in their relationship. The restaurant, which turned into a club after 10 p.m., wouldn’t let her husband in because of how he was dressed but allowed a white friend who was dressed similarly to enter.

“The bouncer let us know that he hadn’t seen what our friend was wearing,” Osborn said. “As we turned to leave, a racial slur was then muttered by a white bystander.”

Osborn alluded to her husband confronting the person, a moment that upended how she viewed the world. 

“Suddenly in those few minutes that played out in slow motion, I was dating a Black man in the age of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and just a few short months after the death of Philando Castile,” she said. “Pop. My reality was broken, my eyes opened and for the first time in my life, I saw color. My life changed.”

Osborn also shared another story about how people treat her two biracial daughters compared to her three white children, and the differences in raising them.

“In three decades, I’d not known how hard it was to find a doll just the right shade of brown,” Osborn said. “I had never been intentional about the faces that appeared in our picture books or in the cartoons on our TV, taking for granted that they all looked like my children.

“I hadn’t had to buy shampoo online because the local stores didn’t have what I needed, and in three decades, I’d never had to consider a world that didn’t look like mine.”

Osborn goes on to say that becoming aware of color and the different experiences Black and white people face made her a better educator. She suggested methods and reading materials other teachers could use—including books by Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates—to better understand and relate to all of their students.

“As white educators, we need to use our power to take action to better understand the experiences of all of the students in our classroom,” Osborn said. 

Osborn declined Starting Line’s request for comment at this time.

Attacks on diversity and schools

While Osborn doesn’t say or suggest anything that should be considered controversial in her video, Swieter’s take on it comes at a time when Iowa—and national—Republicans are attacking and trying to outlaw and/or defund anything they perceive as “woke,” a term first coined by Black Americans that has since been co-opted by conservatives as a catch-all term describing diversity and inclusion efforts, the accurate teaching of history (especially Black history), LGBTQ inclusion efforts, and much more. 

In 2021, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed her “divisive concepts” bill to stop public schools from teaching the non-existent threat of critical race theory (CRT), a graduate school-level concept that Republicans have falsely claimed public school educators are using to indoctrinate children into Marxist beliefs.

Using this framework—as well as claims that parents don’t have enough say in their child’s education—Reynolds and Iowa Republicans pushed through a private school voucher program this year that will divert hundreds of millions of dollars to private school education. Another bill was aimed at defunding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at Iowa regent universities, but ultimately failed to pass.

So what happened in Hampton? By all accounts, Osborn would have been a home run hire for the Hampton-Dumont School District. She already worked at the district’s high school and middle school as an instructional collaborator for innovation and differentiation, and she co-taught American history and science with a focus on English learners in a district that is increasingly becoming more diverse.

Additionally, Osborn has worked in education since 2009, has a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction, and earned her K-12 Iowa principal license in 2019, one of the last steps a teacher needs to become an administrator.

Three years before earning that license, Osborn was considered a rising star in tech education by the National School Board Association. She is also in high-demand as a public speaker in the educational conference circuit.

The fallout

According to a source close to Osborn, who requested anonymity, her interview with the Hampton-Dumont School District’s hiring committee went well. The committee recommended that the school board hire her for the principal position.

The source says that on Thursday, April 20, Hampton-Dumont Superintendent Aaron Becker reached out to Osborn to set up a meeting on Friday, April 21. During that meeting, Becker covered the details of the job, and offered it to Osborn, who accepted it.

According to the Hampton Chronicle, the district sent out a letter to parents on April 21 confirming Osborn was going to start in her new principal role in July 2023. The school board scheduled a special meeting on April 24 where the deal was supposed to be formalized. However, that never happened.

The source close to Osborn said Becker spoke to her the morning of April 24 and said they weren’t going to bring the job offer up for a vote—this was one day after Swieter urged people to tell school board members to vote against Osborn’s appointment. 

The April 24 agenda makes no mention of the elementary school principal, but the source close to Osborn alleges that the district may have altered it. Hampton uses eBOARDsolutions, a digital software, to post its meeting agendas and minutes. 

“So the agenda would not have said her name, but it would have said ‘vote for elementary school principal,’ and then the 24th they changed the agenda and just took that item out completely,” the source said. “They didn’t bring it up, but they didn’t vote on it and they didn’t table it. The superintendent just said, ‘We can’t offer it to her,’ essentially.”

Instead, the school board voted to hire Grundmeyer Leader Services to lead a search for a new principal. Neither of these actions are listed in the April 24 Hampton-Dumont School Board special meeting minutes but are instead reflected in the minutes of a May 17 special meeting, which included a closed session that lasted a little more than three hours.

The Hampton Chronicle’s article on Osborn having the job offer rescinded and the district’s statement on hiring Grundemeyer was published online on May 8 and in print on May 10.

When asked about the situation by the Hampton Chronicle, Hampton-Dumont Superintendent Aaron Becker gave the paper the following statement: 

“While Hampton-Dumont CSD doesn’t discuss specific matters regarding personnel or hiring we can generally advise that when engaging in the hiring process we look at and review a variety of information and sources, prior to a recommendation to the Board, to help us determine who will be a successful candidate in our district and community,” the statement begins. “The Hampton-Dumont CSD is partnering with Grundmeyer Leader Services to conduct a search for a 2023-24 elementary principal. This process will be completed in May.”

The next Hampton-Dumont School Board regular meeting is at 5 p.m. on May 22 in the middle school building. The source close to Osborn said her supporters have signed up to speak. On his Facebook page, Swieter also encouraged people to show up to the meeting. 

by Ty Rushing
05/19/23

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