Confederate flag displayed in Elk Grove school district vehicle; 2 employees on leave
Two Elk Grove Unified School District employees are on paid administrative leave after a parent saw a Confederate battle flag displayed inside their district-issued van as the vehicle was making its rounds and reported it to district officials.
District spokesman James Tan told The Sacramento Bee that officials learned of the sighting Wednesday.
In a statement to The Bee, officials said the district immediately investigated the report, found the flag inside the van’s cabin and removed it, and placed the two employees on leave.
“District vehicles, like district classrooms, must be safe spaces for students and all staff, and an item such as a Confederate flag found in a district van is not tolerated,” the statement read.
The district’s decision was the right call, said Ash Bhagwat, a professor at UC Davis School of Law.
“The district has an obvious interest in not being associated with white supremacy itself,” Bhagwat said. “Confederate symbolism is obviously a symbol of white supremacy.”
The district went on to say it will take further action to “ensure compliance with our policies of professionalism, anti-harassment and anti-hate speech. We thanked the parent who reported this.”
“After sitting there thinking about it, I didn’t instantly call,” Monty Watkins, the parent who made the call, said Thursday. He was conflicted, he said. Watkins didn’t want the employees to lose their jobs, but he picked up the phone.
“It’s a (gutsy) move, driving around Elk Grove, going from school to school. I felt mad that they could drive around with the flag,” Watkins said. “My son was called the N-word on his campus. To see that van, it resonated more.”
Monty Watkins was behind the wheel Tuesday afternoon at Elk Grove Florin and Vintage roads — a quick lunch break from his landscaping business — when he saw the district van beside his work truck, the small replica battle flag hanging from the interior cabin’s air vent.
Watkins knows intimately what the flag symbolizes and the hatred behind it.
A Black man, born and raised in northern Tennessee, the 48-year-old Watkins remembers seeing white-robed Ku Klux Klan members rally at his county’s fairgrounds when he was a child.
The young Watkins thought they were church gatherings.
His grandmother would warn Watkins and his siblings to duck down in their truck to avoid being seen as they drove past.
“I was brought up during the time when the Klan was around. I was raised in that era. There were places we couldn’t go,” he said in a Thursday interview. “This is a very diverse community. The last thing we need is people who work for Elk Grove or the state to be flouting that flag.”
Arguments that the school district employees were exercising protected speech do not hold up at the workplace, said a Sacramento legal scholar.
“The flag is considered speech,” said Brian Lansdberg, law professor emeritus at Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. “It says, ‘The South will rise again.’ That has implications for students and teachers who are African-American. It’s one thing for employees to express their views when they’re not on government time or a government car, but an employee has very little free speech protections when on duty”
The flag, to the viewer, it looks like Elk Grove Unified School District is saying, ‘The South will rise again’ — not an individual’s opinion,” Landsberg continued. “The district doesn’t want to send that message and they’re entitled to say, ‘You can’t say that message on our dime.’”
Elk Grove Unified School District, the area’s largest school district and California’s fifth-largest, has grappled with racism and racist sentiment in its recent past.
In December 2017, a Snapchat video of Pleasant Grove High School students making hate-filled remarks directed at Black people went viral, garnering four million views in four days. A girl in the video called Black people “trash” who “need to die.”
Black students at the Elk Grove school that year reported small nooses hanging from trees on the campus. A white student was alleged to have urinated on a Black teenager’s car after calling him the N-word, The Bee reported. Other Black students were threatened.
Black students at Pleasant Grove went to district administrators, parent groups and community leaders. Hundreds of parents, students, teachers and advocates confronted district leaders at a specially called meeting on race in January 2018 that stemmed from the students’ complaints.
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