With its tidy lawns and generous play spaces, Due West Elementary is the kind of community school that looks so cheerful and pleasant from the outside that you could use it as a backdrop for a small-town movie set.
The school itself is highly rated and is a main draw for homebuyers looking to put their children in one of Atlanta’s best suburban school districts.
But inside the West Cobb school, a controversy is pitting parents against parents and a veteran teacher from the gifted program against her school’s administration.
As the AJC’s Ty Tagami has detailed, fifth-grade teacher Katie Rinderle was suspended earlier this year and could soon be dismissed, after she read a book called “My Shadow is Purple” aloud to her students, who had asked her to read it.
“My Dad has a shadow that’s blue as a berry, and my Mom’s is as pink as a blossoming cherry,” it begins. “There’s only those choices, a 2 or a 1. But mine is quite different, it’s both and it’s none.”
One of the laws being pointed to in Rinderle’s suspension, according to her lawyer, is Georgia’s “divisive concepts” law, passed by the Legislature in the spring of 2021. It was a time when parents had become newly engaged in kids’ schools during COVID and some did not like what they saw.
But a reading of House Bill 1084 shows quickly that the nine “divisive concepts” listed by the law are specifically about race and history.
Nowhere in the legislation is gender or sexuality mentioned. The bill’s author, state Rep. Will Wade, R-Dawsoneville, said the divisive concepts bill was never intended to address those issues.
“I think that if somebody, a teacher or someone, has indicated to this educator that the law that is being used to potentially have her dismissed is House Bill 1084, I think they don’t understand what House Bill 1084 does or they’ve been misquoted.”
He said he has his own opinions about when sexuality is appropriate to teach, but his bill is meant to make sure children are not pitted against each other when they’re learning about “the atrocities of the negative experiences that we had as a nation in which slavery occurred.”
Wade’s bill was one of three laws passed that year laying out what schools can and can’t teach — but it’s hard to see exactly how any of them apply to Rinderle.
Senate Bill 226 from GOP state Sen. Jason Anavitarte deals with explicit material like nudity or sadomasochism that’s defined as “harmful to minors.” But Anavitarte said during a hearing on the bill that the legislation is meant to address only library books and materials, not teachers.
“It’s our intention not to impact the teachers. We’re not trying to criminalize librarians or anything like that, but just deal with the material that some of our kids could be exposed to in a school library,” Anavitarte said then.
Witnesses at the hearing read aloud examples of the kind of content they wanted banned, including scenes with graphic descriptions of rape.
State Sen. Elena Parent, D-Atlanta, told me this week, “The content of My Shadow is Purple does not seem to be anywhere close to what is forbidden under SB 226.”
The only person to raise a concern about Anavitarte’s bill at the hearing was, ironically, a lobbyist for the Cobb County schools.
“We are concerned as a district about where precisely and who precisely is going to be holding the bag on some of this,” she said.
The third bill, the “Parents Bill of Rights,” was celebrated by Gov. Brian Kemp and other Republicans when it passed. But its language is about ensuring that parents can review and even opt-out of curriculum and materials used in the classroom, not firing teachers based on their choice of books.
If all of this seems confusing, that’s because it is. Decisions that were once the domain of teachers and principals have become the business of lawmakers, the governor, and activists who may live hundreds of miles away from the communities affected.
Cobb School Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said last summer that a fail-safe plan for teachers would be to simply use district-approved materials.
“There is no danger — zero whatsoever,” if teachers use district-approved resources, Ragsdale said then. “When you start getting outside of those standards is when you start getting into quicksand, and it is deep and quick.”
But what if Rinderle bought the book at the annual Due West Scholastic Book Fair on campus? That’s exactly where she got it.
The final decision about what happens to Rinderle will come at an Aug. 3 “termination tribunal,” when her lawyer says she’ll fight for her job.
But nothing that’s decided there will address the larger question of how a teacher anywhere in Georgia can know exactly what could land them in this kind of hot water.
Is discussing gender identity “patently offensive,” as Cobb’s rules describe unacceptable material?
And what does a teacher do when one parent’s “divisive concept” is another’s parent’s lesson in acceptance?
That was at play in Cobb County, where one parent complained about Rinderle on a Wednesday and by Friday she was in the principal’s office explaining herself.
But other parents have come to her defense.
One of the most vocal has been Sarah Riggs Amico, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2018 whose daughter was in a previous class of Rinderle’s.
The theme of the year her daughter was in the class was, “We can do hard things.” One of her favorite lessons, Amico said, was a class discussion of a book titled, “Ban This Book.”
Amico said she never perceived Rinderle to have a political agenda of any sort.
“If she had an agenda, it was teaching kids to be critical thinkers by reflex, which I think has really served our daughter well.”
Critical thinking might serve the adults in this scenario well, too.
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