After a two-day termination hearing, the Cobb County School Board voted 4-3 that Due West Elementary teacher Katie Rinderle violated district policies and state law when she read "My Shadow Is Purple" to students. The book features a nonbinary character.
The three-person tribunal overseeing the hearing had sided with Rinderle to keep her job, but as Fox News explains, the school board had the option to accept or change the recommendation.
The teacher's attorneys accuse the school board of putting politics over policy, but Christian author and commentator Janice Crouse calls Rinderle's firing "very fair."
"For a teacher to manipulate students by reading a book like that and fostering those kinds of ideas onto children, that's very problematic, and the parents ought to be quite alarmed," she tells AFN.
Crouse says the fact that Rinderle was reading a small child's book to 10- and 11-year-olds reveals a lot about her intention to indoctrinate rather than teach.
"They should be reading something more complicated than that," the commentator submits. "These are children who are used to reading chapter books; reading a child's book like that is very inappropriate."
In her hearing, Rinderle said her students chose the book, which she purchased at a recent school book fair, out of several options she offered them. The firing can be appealed to the state Board of Education and into court, and Rinderle's attorneys plan to do just that.
