Idaho teacher Sarah Inama, a sixth-grade history educator at Lewis and Clark Middle School, has been ordered to remove signs from her classroom, including one that reads, “Everyone is welcome here.” Inama refuses to comply with the order at the school where she's been teaching for five years.
NBC News reports:
“I love the area that I teach,” she says in an interview with TODAY.com. “It’s really a valuable thing for people to know our human history, things that humans have accomplished, our time on this earth, things that they’ve overcome, patterns that exist.”
Five years ago, when she first put up the two signs, it was to make sure students knew they were in an open and welcoming space. Now, she says she is risking her job in the name of those values.
Inama says the controversy began in January when her principal and vice principal came to her classroom to inform her that two posters on her walls were controversial and needed to be removed, a detail the district verified in an email to TODAY.com. Inama says other teachers were given similar instruction, but she was caught off guard by the directive.
Photos of the two posters show that one features the phrase “Everyone is welcome here,” with an illustration of hands in different skin tones. The other says that everyone in the classroom is “welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued” and “equal.”
“I was just so confused,” she recalls. “I still can’t even wrap my head around what they’re referring to as far as why it’s controversial.”
Inama says the principal cited district policy that classrooms must respect the rights of people to express differing opinions and that decorations are to be “content-neutral.”
“There are only two opinions on this sign: Everyone is welcome here or not everyone is welcome here,” she says. “Since the sign is emphasizing that everyone, in regards to race or skin tone, is welcome here no matter what, immediately, I was like, the only other view of this is racist. And I said, ‘That sounds like racism to me.’”
The signs aren't controversial. Perhaps they wanted her to have a sign reading, "Racists are welcome here."
