Pasco teachers union president under fire for linking school reopening to ‘white privilege’

A Pasco union leader’s controversial comments linking “reopen everything” movements with white privilege have set off calls for people to leave the union.

Pasco Association of Educators President Scott Wilson’s two-minute statement at the Jan. 12 school board meeting linked “free to breathe” and “free to reopen everything” rodeos and rallies with a “culture of white supremacy and white privilege.”

The comments from the white middle school teacher have raised the ire of dozens of people upset about the comparison, and led to a letter circulating on Facebook calling for members to opt out of the teachers union.

“After the alarming comments made by our (PAE) President Scott Wilson last week, we can no long stay silent,” the unsigned letter said. “This is not a true representation of what we as teachers feel we sacrifice and strive to teach students of all colors, cultures and backgrounds.”

This is the latest sign of a divide between the union’s calls for the district to return to total online teaching and some of the teachers’ calls for the schools to open up more.

In the most recent survey available, 80 percent of the nearly 790 teachers who responded, said they didn’t feel safe returning to classrooms with students at current infection rates.

Elementary students have returned to class twice a week for a half a day. District leaders haven’t made a decision on when to expand that and when to bring back middle or high school students.

They are working on a tentative plan that would start in March. Richland and Kennewick middle and high school students are starting to return as soon as next week.

The district’s delay is being spurred by a large number of students from predominately Latino schools who are opting to stay online.

In one elementary school, 42 percent of the enrolled students haven’t returned to in-person classes.

Wilson compared the Benton Franklin Health District’s recommendation that middle and high schools could start returning to school as early as Monday to the U.S. Capitol police moving the barricades during the Jan. 6 riot.

“No one wants remote learning, but it is the right thing to do,” Wilson said. “We know the equity concerns; virus transmission is high and headed higher.”

He repeated calls for the district to return to online learning, especially in light of the large percentage of students who are not returning to class.

“You receive the same emails as I, calling teachers lazy, or comparing them to store clerks,” he said. “They complain their children are suicidal without school or sports. As a father daily surviving the suicide of my son, I find these statements ignorant and another expression of white privilege.”

The union president also released a statement to the members, according to a story from NewsTalk KFLD. In the letter, he said he wasn’t accusing any one person of being a white supremacist or saying any one person was acting out of white privilege.

He told the members he was speaking from his heart and does not “expect everyone to fully understand what the terms ‘white supremacy culture’ or ‘white privilege’ mean.”

Opt-out letter

Wilson’s comments spurred several news reports across the country, with many outraged that Wilson compared opening schools to racial injustice and the riot at the Capitol.

A letter calling for teachers to opt out of the union has been circulating on Facebook following Wilson’s comments.

At least one Pasco teacher shared the unsigned letter urging people who were disturbed by Wilson’s statements to share it themselves.

Along with rejecting Wilson’s comparison, they also called his comments about parents’ concerns about the mental health of their children callous.

“Our union president is paid by our fees to represent ALL teachers of the Pasco School District,” the letter said. “Scott Wilson’s latest letter to PAE members claims a victor with the school board and makes no effort to recall his biased, accusatory comments. He stated that his thought-out, well-prepared words were a ‘teaching moment’ for us.”

The letter recognizes they can’t recall Wilson from the position, but they can strip them of money to make them hear their challenges. They pointed out the members pay $115 each month to the state and local unions. This would translate to $1,300 a year per member.

The members were also urged to say that Wilson’s comments can’t be tolerated as the reason they were leaving the union.

“We want a union that fights for our rights as teachers but that is also willing to listen to our needs and professionally represent us,” the letter says.

Wilson’s response

Wilson told the Herald the science shows COVID-19 has a larger impact on communities of color than it does in white communities.

This appears to be the case in Benton and Franklin counties as well, according to numbers provided by the Benton Franklin Health District. Nearly 2,700 more Latinos have contracted the virus than white people since the start of the outbreak.

It is unclear how many of the 8,400 people who didn’t report their race are either white or Latino.

Pasco is also seeing another trend that is unique in the Tri-Cities. A large percentage of families are opting to keep their children in remote learning rather than returning them to class.

While Kennewick and Richland are seeing less than 15 percent of their elementary students opting for distance learning, Pasco’s percentages are much higher.

The highest percentage of students opting to stay home is at Marie Curie STEM Elementary where 42 percent of the students remained in distance learning after the school opened, according to district figures. Nearly 93 percent of Curie’s students are Latino.

The higher the percentage of Latino students in the school, the more likely they are to have a high percentage of students opting to remain in distance learning, according to figures from the district and the state.

Wilson told the Herald in a statement that the correlation is not a coincidence.

He said many of the Latino students in Pasco come from multi-generational households that would be more at risk if a student brought COVID home.

“We know that in Pasco our students of color are disproportionately choosing remote learning,” he said. “We need to ensure that the educational experience is equitable between remote and in-person, because if we’re focusing on face-to-face without making our remote system robust, we’re perpetuating inequities in educational opportunities that already exist.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 4:04 PM.