Teacher Ordered To Remove Signs, One Reading, 'Everyone Is Welcome Here'
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.”