Swastika on a calculator. Graffiti in halls. Sacramento teachers say school is ignoring racism
Racist graffiti in the halls. Crude comments by students. Oblivious remarks by colleagues.
Black teachers at Sacramento’s Rosemont High School say they’ve endured those offenses time and again, creating an environment in which they don’t trust their administration to resolve disputes in their classrooms.
“I need someone other than myself to stand up and say there’s a problem,” said Michael Reed, 60, a veteran teacher in the Sacramento City Unified School District.
He and several of his peers spoke to The Sacramento Bee after Elysse Versher, a Black assistant principal at another Sacramento high school, filed a lawsuit against the district alleging administrators failed to support her when students harassed her with racist taunting online and at school.
The Rosemont teachers say Versher’s experience is not unique, reflecting an urgency for district administrators to find a better way to address racist behavior by students and adults alike.
“I know several people of color, both current staff and former staff and students, who do not feel Rosemont provides a safe and equitable place to work or learn,” said April Braun, a former English teacher at Rosemont who was recognized as the district’s teacher of the year last year. “I have also seen incidents of racism go either totally unaddressed at all or swept under the rug.
Sacramento City Unified faced a series of difficult conversations about racism on campus over the past year with repeated incidents involving racist graffiti on campus, the resignation of a 7th grade teacher who used a racial slur while discussing language in a class discussion and the harassment that targeted Versher last fall.
The district earlier this year appointed a community liaison to investigate acts of racism, and it says it has a zero tolerance policy against racism.
District spokesman Brian Heap said the administration is fully committed to ensure campuses provide a safe and welcoming environment for all students and staff. The district also contests the characterization of Rosemont High School that the teachers described.
“The Sacramento City Unified School District disagrees with the notion that a ‘pervasive racial climate’ exists at Rosemont High or any of our 76 campuses,” Heap said.
Heap said the administration has “received Mr. Reed’s complaint and take his allegations seriously.” He said the district has investigated and addressed allegations that Reed raised regarding incidents between 2017 and 2019.
He added, “The district has assigned an outside investigator to review the allegations brought by Mr. Reed. As with any investigation, the district will review the findings at the completion of the investigation and address any issues that are brought to light.”
The teachers, nonetheless, are looking for a new direction citing insensitive comments by white colleagues, a lack of accountability for students, and feelings of abandonment after expressing their experiences to administration.
A teacher’s experience
Reed’s most recent experience with racism on campus took place in March, when two Black female students scrawled racist graffiti on the walls of a second-floor hallway.
“Although the racist graffiti found recently at Rosemont High School may have been shocking to readers, it was not an isolated incident,” Reed said. “Racist speech and racist acts are common occurrences on campus.”
Reed is a retired airman now in his second career. He’s worked as an educator in the Sacramento City Unified School District for the past 16 years, and he said Rosemont has tolerated racism and discrimination throughout his time there.
He detailed a number of events including an incident in October 2017 in which he said a gay Black student was racially profiled and bullied by a white student in his English class. The Black student’s schedule was changed and it was the white student that remained in the classroom.
In January 2018, on three separate occasions, Reed heard another staff member use racist trope calling another staff member “an angry Black woman.”
A couple of months later, someone defaced a calculator with a swastika symbol and the N-word written on the school property. The math teacher whose class it occurred in was Black.
This prompted Black educators on campus to meet and discuss ways to make the campus a safe place for Black teachers and students.
During a September 2019 English department meeting with administration, another English teacher said “Black boys don’t read.” Reed, who was present and eventually left the meeting out of disgust, said the teacher went uninterrupted.
During virtual learning, Reed had to shut down a Zoom meeting because students were using profanity and racial slurs toward him. When he reported the incident to administrators, he said they told him “you wanted to teach 9th grade.”
Swastika on calculator
Other teachers supported Reed’s account.
Braun, the 2021 district teacher of the year, left Rosemont at the end of the 2020-21 academic year for many reasons. One of the contributing factors to her resignation was the underlying lack of leadership and solution in handling the racial incidents.
Braun wasn’t the only teacher who eventually resigned from the school.
Ebony Benzing is the former math teacher who found the calculator defaced with hate symbols and racial slurs. She felt let down by the lack of response by administrators and her colleagues on campus.
Instead of an investigation, she was told she needed to have a better ‘check-out’ system in place so she could determine who defaced the school items.
Her white colleagues, she said, told her “don’t take it personal.”
Benzing, who taught at Rosemont for six years, said students of color were treated differently than white students, especially in discipline. A 2019 report based on data from the “Suspending Our Future” survey released by the Black Minds Matter Coalition found that the district suspended the fourth most Black students in the state.
Benzing said she did not feel supported by Sacramento City Unified. She left the campus in 2018 and is no longer teaching.
Another former Rosemont teacher, Crystal Hamilton, first taught at Rosemont as an instructional assistant in 2008. She experienced similar scenarios of implicit bias or racism during her tenure at the school.
In 2008, she recalled an experience where a teacher told her Black people voted for Barack Obama because Oprah Winfrey told them to.
Rebecca Forman, a retired teacher who taught at Rosemont, said that she doesn’t think that the issues are ‘unique’ to Rosemont. She and others said other schools confront similar issues.
“I feel it is a district issue, not just limited to Rosemont. I worked under three different administrators at Rosemont with very similar results,” said Hamilton.
Sacramento vice principal’s lawsuit
Reed followed news about Versher over the past year. The district has acknowledged that someone targeted her with racist harassment, but it has not identified a suspect.
Versher, who is Black, was the victim of a hate crime where racist graffiti was plastered on a campus building where the N-word was visibly written five times, in direct sight of Versher’s parking space.
“Like Versher not the only one and neither am I,” said Reed. “I know too many Black and brown people who have simply said forget it and walked away.”
Reed said he doesn’t feel protected as a Black educator within the district. He often wonders what future Black and brown educators will experience.
“It’s not a safe space, nor a safe place (for Black educators)” said Reed.
“I shouldn’t feel like every day that I go to work, there’s a target on my back,” he said. “I shouldn’t feel that every day that I go to work I have to fight for equity. I shouldn’t ever feel that the same educational opportunities that are appointed to my white colleagues are not afforded to me.”
This story was originally published July 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
