Last July, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a slew of controversial educational bills into law on the pretense of “keeping woke politics out of the classroom.” They included a law granting parents more control over school library selections, and another banning nebulously-defined “divisive concepts” from classrooms.
Around the same time, PEN America released a monthly update on “educational gag orders,” including Georgia’s “divisive concepts” law. With such legislation, the authors contended, “the vagueness is the point.” After all, overly ambiguous restrictions can prove to be the most repressive.
Georgia public school educator Katie Rinderle, who faces termination from Due West Elementary in Cobb County for reading her fifth grade students a book purchased from a school book fair, has experienced this bleak fact firsthand. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), she represents the first casualty of Georgia’s classroom censorship laws.
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Rinderle told The Daily Beast she came across the “offending” book, My Shadow is Purple, by Scott Stuart, at Due West’s Scholastic Book Fair in February.
Its story follows a young student who, in having both traditionally masculine and feminine interests (sports and dance, toy trains and toy ponies, etc.), defies the gender binary—as symbolized by the child’s titular purple, rather than pink or blue, shadow.
Eventually, when prompted to choose between “pink” or “blue” at a school dance, the distraught child’s classmates come to the rescue, eschewing the dichotomy and celebrating their individualities regardless of the color of their shadows. The story ends with their teacher exclaiming, “Whatever your colour [sic], start dancing, have fun!”
Due West Elementary parents reported that their children were worried and confused over the departure of teacher Katie Rinderle.
Katherine RinderleIn short, it’s a fictional, rhyming picture book with a message about accepting oneself and one’s peers—the sort of anodyne work one might expect Scholastic to sell at its book fair (and to disseminate teaching resources for).
Rinderle thought it conveyed “a wonderful message,” not unlike other books she had in her classroom, she told The Daily Beast. “I knew I had to get it.” Her fifth grade class, made up of mostly 10 and 11-year-olds, was drawn to the story as well. (On one particular day, given the option to choose among yet-unread books in the classroom, they voted overwhelmingly for My Shadow Is Purple.)
After Rinderle read the book, students discussed its messages “of acceptance of oneself and others” and “embracing diverse experiences,” before writing poems to “make their own connections and reflections.”
But this lesson about self-acceptance and tolerance apparently upset one student’s mother, who also happens to work for the district. Rinderle told The Daily Beast that the parent “wrote a few lengthy letters telling me her professional and personal opinion [about the book] being divisive and the topic being inappropriate.” (Rinderle’s attorney provided The Daily Beast with a redacted screenshot of one such email, in which the parent stated, “I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”)
Such complaints, too, were expressed to the principal, assistant principal, and superintendent. “That led me to being placed on administrative leave,” Rinderle said. An investigation ensued and, on May 5, the Due West teacher learned that she would be recommended for termination.
“You’re talking about an exemplary teacher [who] would go the extra mile for her students,” Rinderle’s attorney, Craig Goodmark, told The Daily Beast. “Her combination of compassion, as well as skill, made her somebody that we should be trying to replicate and not terminate.” Prior to her termination, Rinderle, who has worked for Cobb County School District for a decade, reportedly received glowing feedback from her principal.
Throughout meetings and investigatory conferences in March, Rinderle recalls being puzzled by the district’s lack of transparency about what she was being chided for. While, as the SPLC reports, school administrators made references to “divisive” and “inappropriate topics,” Rinderle said she was left in the dark as to how she had transgressed district policy.
“My experience was very unclear along the way, [in regard to] what exactly was ‘divisive’ [about the lesson, as] they continually repeated throughout our meetings,” she told The Daily Beast. Goodmark noted that, at one point, Rinderle “point blank asked” a school administrator, “What does divisive concept mean to you?” She received no answer then, nor to this day.
“It’s not clear what a divisive concept is. It’s not clear [what] Cobb County’s policies that incorporate those statutes…mean. And it’s especially unclear because Katie asked them what they mean and they said they can’t tell us that,” Goodmark told The Daily Beast. This confounding predicament, he said, is a product of how “the state has developed these censorship laws for teachers.”
Due West Elementary’s principal wrote many notes praising teacher Katie Rinderle.
Katherine RinderleAs school districts began integrating such laws into their policies last year, they were met with significant resistance from teachers and other critics. At the time, ostensibly to assuage educators’ anxieties, the superintendent of Cobb County schools assured teachers they were in “no danger—zero whatsoever,” as long as they adhered to teaching materials approved by the district, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Firing Rinderle for reading a book she purchased within the walls of Due West Elementary School, however, sends a message quite to the contrary.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson from Cobb County School District said that the district “remains committed to strictly enforcing all Board policy, and the law” and “is confident that this action is appropriate considering the entirety of the teacher’s behavior and history.” The district was unable to comment further, however, as the “matter is ongoing.”
Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp speaks at a campaign event in Kennesaw, Georgia on Nov. 7, 2022.
Dustin Chambers/ReutersIndeed, Rinderle and Goodmark will fight for her position in the district in a termination hearing scheduled for early August. It will be an uphill battle, though—as Goodmark explained, “We’re concerned that we’re being held to a standard that’s not defined in the statute to any degree of certainty.”
Rinderle told The Daily Beast that she remains primarily concerned with “the lasting impact that this has on students and teachers,” adding that “many educators fear retaliation from these vague laws, and from not having a clear understanding how to best serve students under [them].”
“These laws have created a state where teachers are self-censoring… discussions about what somebody has called a ‘controversial’ issue,” Goodmark said. “And that’s bad for public schools, that’s bad for Georgia, and it is especially bad for students in Georgia.”
And, of course, the issue extends beyond classrooms in the Peach State. According to PEN America, teachers across the country are now grappling with vague educational gag orders, like Georgia’s “divisive concept” law, currently on the books in 19 states.
The deleterious impact of these restrictions imposed by Republican legislatures is made clear when they target educators like Rinderle. But considering that there are innumerable others who resort to self-censorship to avoid running afoul of them—and are certainly made more leery by cases like Rinderle’s—the full extent of the damage they cause remains largely unquantifiable.
