In August 2024, Portland Public Schools (PPS) introduced a new administrative directive stating that inside school buildings, content such as art or posters must be relevant to class curriculum and cannot represent the personal or political expressions of staff members. Media posted outside of a classroom — in hallways or on doors — must be pre-approved by administration and are subject to removal if they do not adhere to the specified guidelines.
According to Sydney Kelly, PPS’ Communications Specialist, the directive was created in response to many schools’ requests to display art in their buildings. Kelly says, “(The directive) acts as a reminder to all of our student-centered mission, and also reminds our staff to use District spaces for educational purposes.”
The PPS guidelines state that teachers may express beliefs aligning with the district’s values of racial equity and social justice, as such statements are not considered political. “The rainbow (pride) flag and BLM (Black Lives Matter) poster are district-approved symbols of inclusion to often marginalized students,” Kelly says. “Posters advocating for specific positions on political positions are not student centered in that they are not rooted in our educational mission or curriculum.”
The Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) has filed an official grievance against the directive. “It’s overreaching, overly broad and rife with possibilities for misuse,” says PAT president Angela Bonilla.
While teaching at Rigler Elementary School, which has a large population of immigrant students, Bonilla altered her class curriculum to better serve her students’ needs. Following President-elect Donald Trump’s initial election in 2016, many of
her fourth-graders expressed worry about what his presidency could mean for their lives. She decided to lead a whole-class discussion, encouraging her students to ask questions about the election’s outcome and its possible impact. Bonilla remembers one of her former students, who is Muslim, asking, “‘Is he really gonna take all the
Muslims and put us in a camp?’” She also recalls another student often breaking into tears when her dad left for work, worrying that he wouldn’t come home that day. Bonilla’s impromptu discussion, which covered the branches of government and federal balance of power, helped assuage her students’ concerns, even though the concepts they learned are typically introduced the following year.
The class made a poster with the questions students had asked as well as the answers
they came up with. If Bonilla were to hang that same poster up this year, she could face consequences under the new directive. Bonilla feels that this is unjust: while the topics may not be directly tied to the curriculum, she says, “They’re connected to my students’ lived experience, and they’re connected to current events and they’re connected to being a responsive educator. So this administrative directive is not allowing us to be the teachers our students need.”
Grant High School Principal James McGee, however, says that according to the district the directive is not a new concept, but rather a codification of what was already expected of PPS staff.
In the first months of 2024, before the directive was implemented, Grant social studies teacher Suzanna Kassouf taught a lesson concerning the historic
origins of the Israel-Hamas War. “(The lesson) was basically asking students to investigate what is at the root of all of the violence that we’re seeing today,” she says.
In Kassouf’s lesson, she assigned students different historical roles on the spectrum of being either for or against Zionism. At the end of the assignment, students created posters choosing who or what they thought was to blame for the violence which were later posted outside her classroom.
PPS began receiving complaints about these posters from the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. Bob Horenstein, the chief community relations and public affairs officer for the organization, says the complaints stemmed from the non-profit’s disagreement with the way Kassouf structured her lesson. Members believed Kassouf taught her personal perspective on the conflict rather than one that is objective. “She
was distorting the true history of the origin of this conflict. And she was expressing, through what she was teaching, her own personal political views,” he says.
Kassouf was first asked by the Grant administration, who she emphasizes had been directed by the district, to move posters calling for a ceasefire from the hallway to the inside of her classroom. This initial request did not include taking down posters calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. “At first, the ask was that I would move the student work posters into my classroom, and I was just asked to do it. I wasn’t demanded to,” Kassouf says. And so I said, ‘Well, okay … I’m not
gonna move the student posters if I’m just being asked to.’”
Instead, she printed out the word “censored” and pasted it over printed posters’ use of the word “ceasefire.” Kassouf also replaced certain student posters in the hallway with sheets of similarly labeled paper. “I wanted to make a point that we are censoring social justice speech,” she says. The response to this was even stricter: “The next day, I was called in for another meeting. I was told I had to take
those posters down, and I would be disciplined if I didn’t,” says Kassouf.
Jeremy Reinholt is one teacher at Grant who has been caught in the crossfire. After the directive was implemented, Reinholt put up posters on his classroom walls and a
hallway-facing window next to his classroom door reading “Stop the Genocide.” The next week, they were taken down. According to Reinholt, there was no communication from administration prior to their removal.
Reinholt says that while he explained to a Grant vice principal and district official how the concept of genocide related to his curriculum, and they both agreed with him, he was told he had to take the posters down regardless because he was not currently teaching the topic. After taking them down, he then replaced the posters on his walls with new ones which read, “Palestinian Lives Matter.” In November, he was told to take them down as well despite their relevance to units he would teach through to January 2025. “The (directive) is clearly in violation of the Oregon constitution,” says Reinholt, comparing it to a similar Newberg School District policy that was deemed unconstitutional for banning “political” or “controversial” classroom decorations. While the Newberg policy wasn’t identical to the PPS directive — theirs didn’t include exceptions for Black Lives Matter posters and pride flags — the two were similar enough that Reinholt believes PPS’ directive would also be unconstitutional.
Watching the new directive play out at Grant, Reinholt has begun to question its enforcement. “According to the directive, decorations on classroom walls must relate directly to the curriculum taught in the class. However, no one has said a single word to me about the art my children made for me that I have on the wall near my desk,” says Reinholt. “I am not aware of a single teacher in the building that has been asked or ordered to remove personal items that do not relate to the curriculum they teach.”
Grant chemistry teacher Ramey Adams has had a post from X, formerly known as Twitter, taped to her classroom window since the 2023-24 school year. The post says, “did it hurt? when you found out that hard work doesn’t guarantee success in a capitalist society.” Though civics do not relate to the periodic table, Adams says she has never heard complaints from administration about the post.
“As far as I know,” Reinholt says, “the only decorations targeted by the directive so far have been related to Israel and Palestine.”
McGee says Grant administration “absolutely will address” all violations of the policy brought to their attention, regardless of the messages’ content.
“I think this situation has made it very clear that we claim to have values of social justice, but actually we just mostly agree,” says Kassouf. “We are very clearly capitulating to the group that has more power … and it’s honestly really heartbreaking as an Arab person to feel like I’m in a district that’s constantly talking about social justice, but not when it comes to my people.”
Bonilla feels that the union’s grievance, if given the chance, could win against the district’s “overreaching” directive. She believes that Kimberlee Armstrong, the new PPS superintendent, will make decisions that align with the PAT’s desires. Bonilla says there were clear communication problems between Armstrong and the team working on the directive. The miscommunications were exemplified in their meeting with the PAT, in which Armstrong, who had just settled into her position, had seemingly not been informed about the directive. “I have faith that our superintendent is going to do right when she has the information,” Bonilla says. “She seems to be very good at looking for that information and asking the right questions and not letting people get off the hook.”
Reinholt feels similarly. “The union is doing everything they can to fight this,” he says. “It’s just going to take time.”
