Tensions rise in Virginia schools over racial issues

By Eric Felton for RealClearWire

In January 2022, Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, showed race opponents the school door on his first day in office. During the campaign, Youngkin promised voters he would end what he called “inherently divisive policies, programs, training and curriculum” that focused on race. Conservative parents were protesting ideologically imposed “anti” training in schools across the state. A year later, the conflicts born of “Critical Race Theory” are still playing out in Virginia schools.

But it’s not just students and their parents who have complained about the race-based curriculum at Commonwealth. Teachers, school staff and administrators are among those who have been made anxious and uncomfortable by racially divisive programs.

Emily Mies was an assistant principal at Agner-Hirt Elementary School in Charlottesville. She is suing the Albemarle County School Board in federal court for tolerating, if not creating, racial animosity in the workplace. The lawsuit is complicated by allegations that Mies himself contributed to a racially charged environment.

The Albemarle County School Board voted to establish an anti-racism curriculum in 2019. In November 2020, local schools began implementing a policy requiring all staff to undergo anti-racism training. When the sessions began, several teachers at Agner-Hirt Elementary complained to Mies that the program was creating racial antagonisms rather than bringing about racial understanding. He encouraged her to course “hurtful and derogatory comments” and felt she was being demonized because she was white. Mies told the court that he forwarded those concerns to Ashby Kindler, the administrator in charge of training. Mies says Kindler refused to address the teachers’ complaints. Kindler referred interview requests from RCP to school board spokesman Phil Giaramita, who said, “We are not at liberty to speak.”

Many parents were also unhappy. Many spoke out against the anti-racist curriculum at the school board meeting on May 27, 2021. One parent complained that the program was “fostering a culture rooted in grievance, discord and victimhood.” Several parents spoke in favor of the program.

Mais made it through mandatory training almost without incident. But on the program’s last day, June 11, 2001, he allegedly participated in a conversation about how to address “racial disparities among school board personnel,” which included people of color.

Except that Mies didn’t say “colored people.” She said “people of color”.

Mies recognized that he had made a potentially problematic error — what his lawyers called a “slip of the tongue.” She apologized immediately and profusely to everyone who heard her. She repeated her apology to the others. But an apology wasn’t good enough for Sheila Avery, a teacher’s aide, according to claims in court documents. In front of participants at a training seminar, Avery accused Mies of “talking like an old racist telling people of color to go to the back of the bus.”

In the days that followed, Mies says, Avery, who is black, heard from other teachers calling him racist. Alleging that she was being treated unfairly, she went to the school principal for help. Mies said the abuse was causing her “extreme mental and emotional distress” that was preventing her from doing her job. Mies says the principal did nothing about it.

However, Mais was approached by a more senior administrator, one of the school board’s assistant superintendents, Dr. Contacted by Bernard Hairston. As he said in a video to school employees, Hairston was “entrusted” with developing the Albemarle County School District’s anti-racism policy. In her video, Hairston said, “The school board should do Get serious about confronting this institutional system built on perpetuating whiteness!

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In early August 2021, Hairston called Mies to meet with him and Avery. In his 2022 court filing, Mies said that despite “constantly apologizing throughout the meeting,” Avery refused to accept his apology. Instead, Hairston called on Mies to apologize to the entire school staff.

In late August, Mies announced his resignation effective September 10, 2021. According to his filing in district court, the school board “pressured him to apologize to Agnor for all of 2021-2022. Hurts the teachers.” Mies claims that the school’s guidance counselor, Emily Holmstrom, rejected the draft apology, in which Mies planned to express how distressing the incident was to him. According to Mies, Holmstrom told her she was acting “like a typical defensive white person.” (Holmstrom did not respond to an email from RealClearPolitics.)

At a school-wide meeting of Agner-Hurt teachers on September 9, 2021, Mies issued a public apology. Avery used the meeting to denounce Mies as a racist, telling the assembled school employees that they “could be on her side or Mies’s side and there was nothing in between. (Avery did not respond to RCP’s request for an interview.) Mies then decided to file a lawsuit alleging that he had been subjected to a hostile work environment.

In the Virginia Attorney General’s Office for Civil Rights, Mies charged the Albemarle schools with discrimination. She took her complaint to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nothing helped.

With the help of the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, Mais eventually brought a raft of complaints against the school district. He alleged that the school board violated his right to free speech under the Virginia Constitution; She claimed that she was wrongfully forced out of her job; Accuses Schools of Violating Virginia Human Rights Act; and asserted that Albemarle County had violated Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act. That provision “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.”

At a hearing in December, the school district’s attorney, Jeremy Capps, scoffed at the idea that Mies faced a hostile work environment, with Avery twice calling Mies a “two-faced, white racist bitch.” Mais, Capps said, “didn’t really like being asked to apologize” in front of the school’s teachers and staff. But that, he said, “does not make for a hostile work environment.”

US District Court Judge Norman K. Moon disagreed, and even after she repeatedly apologized to those who heard her comment, management forced Mais to apologize again. Even after Mies gave her notice of resignation, school officials insisted she go to a special meeting of teachers and staff on her last day to apologize again: “It’s like someone was shot in a way,” the judge said. He asked the school board’s lawyer: “I mean, when are you going to leave? At what point is it enough? “

The judge seemed troubled by Mies’s lawyer, Hal Frampton, who called her “disgraceful.” “Ordinarily,” said the judge, “is the punishment of someone wronged a public punishment?”

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The school board’s attorney did not directly answer the judge’s question. Instead, Capps said, what is considered “appropriate discipline” is “at the employer’s discretion.” RealClearPolitics wrote to Capps asking if he could point to any other instances where the Albemarle school board has issued public punishment. Capps didn’t answer.

Albemarle Schools asked the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia to throw out all of Mies’ complaints. Last month, the court dismissed most of their claims, primarily on questions of jurisdiction and states’ sovereign immunity.

But not those made under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: In a memorandum opinion, Judge Moon allowed Mies’ federal complaint to proceed, writing that “Plaintiff alleges a demonstrably racially hostile work environment under Title VII.”

“Plaintiff has alleged sufficient facts to permit a jury to determine whether the alleged harassment was ‘severe or pervasive.'” Mais’ allegations include that when she turned to her school’s principal for help, “no action was taken”; When she complained to the assistant superintendent and human resources employees that she was “a target of racially charged harassment … the school board took no action.”

Mies’s case may go too far in considering someone justified in accusing them of racism. Complicating those controversies in Virginia’s case was the sudden resignation last week of state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Ballou. He led Youngkin’s efforts to reform how the state’s schools taught such socially divisive issues as those dealing with race and history. Will the governor’s charge against critical race theory be overshadowed? The answer to that question will affect how scHoles like the one in Albemarle County teach questions of race, like the lawsuit brought by Emily Mies.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

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