The Federal Way School District recently agreed to pay $50,000 in settlement funds to an African-American woman and former teacher at TAF (Technology Access Foundation) Academy, who filed a civil lawsuit against the district after she was asked to read a poem entitled “Niggerlips” in 2013.
Tenesha Fremstad filed the lawsuit in May 2014, claiming the school district discriminated against her when the school’s then-instructional coach Pam Wise handed out poems to staff during a meeting on the school’s professional development day, known as Data Day on May 3, 2013.
Fremstad, the only African American teacher at TAF Academy, was asked to read the poem by Martín Espada. But she refused, as she found the N-word offensive.
Although Wise was let go by the TAF Foundation, Fremstad alleged TAF Academy Principal Paul Tytler and other staff retaliated against her for her subsequent complaints filed throughout the rest of 2013.
Some of these allegations include Tytler calling her names such as “brat” and “diva,” Tytler refusing to be her mentor for a leadership internship with the University of Washington, Tytler giving her an unfavorable evaluation and withholding an open dean of students position at TAF while hiring someone else after he had written her letters of recommendation for dean positions at other schools.
Fremstad, who was a sixth grade humanities teacher at TAF, has since started as the dean of students at Illahee Middle School for the 2014-2015 school year.
Mediation
While apologetic of the circumstances surrounding Data Day, the school district’s attorney Tyna Ek, a former employee of Soha & Lang, wrote a letter on Oct. 28, 2014 to mediator Carolyn Cairns with Stokes Lawrence law firm. In the letter, she wrote that “it is difficult to imagine what more the district could have done to express its regret that Ms. Fremstad unfortunately was offended by being asked to read this provocative poem as part of a training exercise.”
Mediation would take place on Nov. 4, 2014.
Ek stated Wise’s intentions were to spur group discussion concerning how the teachers could better empathize with and relate to the experiences and feelings of their minority teachers.
“Niggerlips” by Martín Espada was published by the Academy of American Poets and Espada was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Ek pointed out.
The poem was recommended for use by teachers in a school setting, she added.
“We understand that the mere title of this poem has initial shock value — we believe that was the poet’s intent — but we also believe that when a jury hears the full story and explanation, that they will never conclude that the people dedicated to and working at the TAF Academy are racists or that they discriminated against Ms. Fremstad based upon her race,” Ek wrote.
However, when Wise questioned Fremstad about her feelings of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or other literature that used the N-word, Fremstad allegedly replied that she was offended by those pieces of work as well.
Ek explained that because Wise wasn’t a district employee, that “alone eliminates some of” Fremstad’s claims, such as “negligent hiring, training and supervision.”
“Ms. Fremstad is a good traditional teacher but she did not embrace what others were attempting to accomplish at TAF Academy,” Ek wrote. “She fought input and enrichment efforts from the foundation that were essential to the public-private partnership, perpetually questioning the foundation’s ‘authority’ to provide input or suggestions to teachers who were district employees.”
Ek said she fought the inclusion of STEM material in her humanities classes, which was “critical to the mission of providing these students with STEM focused education, which is the central mission of the Academy.”
Thaddeus P. Martin, Fremstad’s attorney, also wrote a letter to the mediator explaining that Tytler had approved the plan for Data Day and that the principal designee never spoke against using or not using the poem or the “worrisome statements Fremstad made” that day.
Martin said Fremstad’s colleague made inappropriate voice impersonations of Fremstad in front of students following her filed complaints of retaliation and she was removed from the Building Leadership Team.
“Ms. Fremstad has ample evidence to establish each of the following that harassment was offensive and unwelcome,” Martin wrote. “… That this occurred because of her religion, race and/or sexual orientation and that it affected the terms or conditions of employment and that the harassment can be imputed to the employer.”
The school district’s internal investigations repeatedly found Fremstad’s claims that she was being retaliated against unsubstantiated.
Interim Superintendent Sally McLean wrote a letter on Nov. 12, 2014 apologizing to Fremstad on behalf of the school district.
“We sincerely regret that you were offended by the instructional coach’s provocative training technique and material,” McLean wrote. “We have learned from this experience and will seek to apply what we have learned in developing alternative approaches to address these sensitive issues.”
McLean also informed Fremstad that she continues to be a “respected employee of the Federal Way school district” and she looks forward to the positive relationship going forward.
The next day, Fremstad signed a Release and Settlement Agreement for $50,000 that barred her, her lawyers and all financial advisors from speaking about her lawsuit, the settlement and former complaints to the media or any other third party.
The agreement also absolved the district and its employees from all of her allegations and claims of discrimination and retaliation.
Poet’s point of view
Having followed Fremstad’s case since the spring, Espada, a University of Massachusetts Amherst English professor, acknowledges the circumstances pose important questions: How should we educate students, and each other, about racism? How do we account for the pain triggered by the language of racism, and how do we confront that painful language as teachers and as writers?
“I do think the situation that day could have been handled differently,” Espada wrote in a statement to the Mirror. “Certainly, once this teacher declined to read the poem in the training session, I, personally, would not have pressed her on the matter.”
But Espada believes the anti-racist message of his poem has been lost in the debate.
Espada points out that a reviewer in Publisher’s Weekly said the poem “demonstrates the sad ignorance that characterizes racism on the one hand … and the ironic self-awareness it impels on the other.”
“The racial obscenity in the title was directed against me,” Espada wrote. “It was my high school nickname, as the first two lines of the poem make clear. Thus, the poem is a product of my own painful personal experience, a challenge to the racists who inflicted that pain on me and would inflict it on others.”
Espada said the values expressed in the poem are values he embraced in the household of a man jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus — his father who came here from Puerto Rico and became a civil rights activist.
Censorship of the racist language would only prevent Espada from confronting the racism behind that language and “naming it for what it is,” he wrote.
“Poets of color have historically chosen to confront such language — and the pain it provokes — explicitly, head-on,” he wrote, noting Countee Cullen’s poem, “Incident,” is a perfect example. “In the tradition of Cullen, Langston Hughes and so many others, I am ethically, politically and artistically compelled to do the same.”
