Worthington school board votes to remove LGBTQ+, Puerto Rican flags from Latino teacher's classroom

CATHY WURZER: The Queer Legislators Caucus of the Minnesota legislature has spoken out against a decision by Worthington school board to take down flags representing LGBTQ and Puerto Rican identity. The school board has been debating the issue since the fall after a parent complained to the superintendent over an LGBTQ pride flag with the words, "Everyone Is Welcome Here."

A science teacher at Worthington High School put up that flag in his classroom, along with a Puerto Rican flag. Here's school board member Erin Schutte Wadzinski questioning superintendent John Landgaard over the issue.

ERIN SCHUTTE WADZINSKI: And how is-- how is the Puerto Rican flag controversial?

JOHN LANDGAARD: It's been a social issue of what has been controversial up and down and on. And again, I'm going to stop you a little bit, I'm not on trial here. We made the decision, now it's your turn to make a decision.

CATHY WURZER: The teacher has announced plans to leave at the end of the school year, and Worthington is not the only district in the state to have entered culture-war debates over LGBTQ pride symbols or books. Farmington and St. Louis Park are other recent examples.

Sahan Journal education reporter Becky Dernbach has been following this issue, including in Worthington where the controversy was first reported by The Worthington Globe, and Becky's on the line. Good to hear your voice my friend. How are you?

BECKY DERNBACH: Hi, Cathy. I'm well. Thank you. How are you?

CATHY WURZER: Good. I'm fine. Thanks. Thanks for being here. Well, you point out in your article that a parent complained about the pride flag, but the school board voted to take down the Puerto Rican flag too. So what do we know about how the board arrived at this decision?

BECKY DERNBACH: Well, they said that it wasn't explicitly approved in the curriculum, and some of the school board members had specific concerns about flags and which flags should be allowed in classrooms. So here's school board member Steve Schneider.

STEVE SCHNEIDER: I think in a public building in the State of Minnesota, the Minnesota flag and the United States flag are two flags that we fly. And the other flags, you know, you can be proud of where you live, but you also came here and you're going to school here and you're part of our State of Minnesota and you should also be proud to be here and be proud to support the State of Minnesota and the United States flag.

CATHY WURZER: Your reporting Becky shows that the flags were high school science teacher Jose Morales Collazo's latest effort to make Latino and queer students feel welcome. What other steps had he taken prior to that do, you know?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So he had started a Cultural Advocacy group to honor different cultural holidays. For example, Hispanic Heritage Month, he put up Papel Picado, which is sort of the colorful Mexican paper cuts that some people associate with the movie Coco, he put those up in the hallways during Hispanic Heritage Month. They celebrated Black History Month as well. And he had made efforts to have Pride Month during school as well, but he felt that those efforts were not received well by district leadership.

CATHY WURZER: Has he run into resistance from the district in the past?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So for the Cultural Advocacy group, he wanted to make it an official student club and that would have allowed him to fundraise for it instead of spending money out of his own pocket. And he asked the superintendent-- he showed me that email exchange-- and the superintendent said, no, this isn't the right time of year to request a new club and we're not having new clubs right now because of budget concerns.

And then he had asked-- so the students had wanted to celebrate Pride Month during April, it traditionally is celebrated during June, but students aren't in school in June. So he wanted to move it into April, and so he emailed the director of instruction and asked him about that, and the director of instruction basically shut him down without explanation and just said, no, we need to take a break. Let's not move Pride Month into April.

CATHY WURZER: What has the superintendent said about all of this?

BECKY DERNBACH: The superintendent told me that it was really important for schools to be a neutral space and for the school walls to be a neutral space, and that they didn't want to introduce materials on the walls to make people uncomfortable-- that would make people uncomfortable or that would be controversial. And he also said this is sort of a no-win situation, where people are going to be unhappy no matter what you decide.

CATHY WURZER: I know that Worthington's population is about 40% Latino, and the teacher in question was only one of a few Latino teachers in the district. All the school board members, though, are white. Did diversity in recruitment and retention of teachers come up at all during this debate?

BECKY DERNBACH: One school board member brought that up and she ended up being the only school board member to vote no on this vote. So here she is discussing it, Erin Schutte Wadzinski.

ERIN SCHUTTE WADZINSKI: It's imperative that we take actions as a school district that are going to encourage staff to stay here, encourage potential teachers to want to work here. Types of actions that are demonstrating that we don't support this type of expression is not going to help us fill the teacher gap. I guarantee it.

CATHY WURZER: What's the Latino community saying in Worthington about this?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So I heard from-- I heard from a few people, I heard from a student actually who said that she protested right when this first arose in October. And she said she was-- she said she was physically threatened and threatened with death and that there was a lot of bullying that resulted from this. And she really stands in support of her teacher and there are-- and I've been hearing a lot of comments to that tune from students at Worthington High School.

CATHY WURZER: The story was first reported by The Worthington Globe, and I understand leaders at the Globe believe a vandalism incident was connected to the reporting on the issue. What happened there?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So the Globe has been doing really great reporting on this issue, covering school board meeting after school board meeting. And they had a really great in-depth story in November about where things were at. And a few days after that story, member's car was vandalized with spray painted with homophobic messages. And they believe that that staff member was followed home after one of these school board meetings.

Sort of that somebody-- they believe that somebody cased out his house or his home to see where he later when the car was accessible a few days later and spray-painted it graffiti. And the Globe has spoken out against this and they say that they are not going to back down, and that this is absolutely an inappropriate way to-- they've just really spoken out against it and they say that they're angry that there are people in the community who think they can threaten the news media this way.

CATHY WURZER: And they were just doing their job.

BECKY DERNBACH: Absolutely.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that this is not the only recent example of a controversy over pride flags or books in classrooms around Minnesota. What's behind this? What's driving this?

BECKY DERNBACH: Oh, that is a big question. There has been a national push that is sort of-- I mean, we saw in 2021, there was a big push back against critical race theory, or supposedly critical race theory in schools. Now that effort has sort of morphed into-- we're seeing attacks on the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We're seeing attacks on LGBTQ books in schools and on rights for transgender kids in schools.

And I mean, there are some people who are right-wing communication strategists who have been pretty clear that they are trying to-- they're trying to raise division about this issue and they're trying to undermine confidence in public education. And so right now-- right now, those, quote-unquote, "culture-war issues" really have a lot of focus on LGBTQ inclusion in schools.

CATHY WURZER: This is an issue that obviously isn't going to go away. I appreciate your reporting on it.

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: By the way, Becky is Sahan Journal's education reporter. Becky Dernbach, you can read her work at sahanjournal.org. We also have a link to her story on our website, mprnews.org.