The Portland school board’s refusal to sign off on firing a popular Black teacher accused of lying to his principal is raising wider questions about institutional racism and limits on principals’ and the superintendent’s authority.
The board voted 4-3 to block Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero’s move to fire the teacher, who said he was out sick when he was in fact doing paid work elsewhere during school hours.
Many Portland Public Schools principals and the losing board members have blasted that decision, saying it undermines the ability of Oregon’s largest school district to discipline other educators who behave badly.
Questions about race and racism, which often bubble just below the surface in overwhelmingly white Portland, came explicitly to the fore in the debate about consequences for skipping work and lying about it.
Normally school board deliberations about whether to fire or discipline school district employees are held behind closed doors. But Ockley Green Middle School dance teacher Damon Keller requested a public hearing.
Keller is one of the only Black teachers in the historically Black school in inner North Portland, where 60% of students currently identify as Black, Latino or multiracial. Many of his students described his class as both a refuge and a gateway to a highly coveted and competitive spot on the renowned dance team at nearby Jefferson High.
But he has also been dogged by disciplinary issues in the past seven years, including write-ups for physical misconduct involving students and neglect of duty. In 2021, the state Teacher Standards and Practices Commission put him on a two-year probation.
Ockley Green’s principal turnover has complicated matters. Julie Rierson began last fall as the school’s third leader in three years. By this spring, after Keller’s tug-of-war with Rierson over his request for leave that she denied, Guerrero concurred with Rierson that it was time for Keller to go.
Dozens of students and parents at Ockley Green felt otherwise. They staged multiple walkouts to protest his suspension and showed up in force at school board meetings, bearing signs that accused the district of failing to support Black teachers.
Keller’s decision to have the deliberations be public was a gamble that paid off. By one vote, the school board sided with him, with the board’s three Black members and one white one, Julia Brim-Edwards, voting to allow him to keep his job. The four directed Guerrero to come up with alternative discipline.
Board member Michelle DePass, who is Black, said she decided before the hearing that she would speak first, planting her flag in hopes that her colleagues would follow. She questioned district officials’ decision to document the Black teacher’s behavior and activities over many years.
“The district has been documenting Keller for eight years. They’ve been waiting for him to mess up,” she said. “I have never experienced a white person being scrutinized like that over that length of time and then dismissed. We shouldn’t hold Black people to a higher standard of conduct than everyone else.”
Andrew Scott, a white board member, countered her take. “I have never heard comments that race-based in this type of a setting,” he said. Scott, who said he planned to vote to terminate Keller, also requested a report about how the district plans to help stabilize Ockley Green in 2023-2024 after years of upheaval.
“We created a future lawsuit in that moment” of not upholding the decision to fire Keller, he said. “It was extraordinarily troubling.”
TWO TALES OF KELLER
In a 2018 Portland Public Schools promotional video, Keller talks tenderly about watching his students grow and learn and counts down their ball-changes, plies and pas-de-bourrées.
Public testimony as he was under fire reinforced his role as a rock for students of color seeking an anchor. “He welcomed my daughter into the dance program and made her feel so special that the dance program quickly became her favorite, her reason for going to school,” Amy Abugo Ongiri, an Ockley Green parent and a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Portland, told the school board. “He served as a rare African-American male role model ... The kids and the entire Ockley Green community won’t benefit from the firing of Mr. Keller.”
His former students, Keller told the board, have gone on to become backup dancers for superstars including Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Beyoncé. He teaches his students to “follow the rules,” he said, and he wept when describing his heartache at missing this spring’s high school dance team auditions and eighth grade clap-outs because he was on administrative leave.
“I have missed out on their smile, their sass, their confiding and trust in me and most important, my adoration for a group of young people that have overcome some tremendous hurdles,” Keller said. His goal, he added, was to someday become a PPS principal.
But his record was checkered. In March of 2016, he was reprimanded after another teacher said he pushed a student to the floor after a dodgeball game; Keller said it was an involuntary physical reaction after the student hit him in the chest when he was expecting a high-five.
Two years later, there were more complaints. In 2018, Keller was alleged to have thrown shoes at students to get their attention and cursed at and disparaged students who were changing their menstrual supplies while trying to get them to class. After a TSPC investigation, he was put on a two-year probation in April of 2021 for “gross neglect of duties.” Keller didn’t challenge the allegations but told the board he acceded only because he wanted to keep his job. In his version of events, he is a reactor, not an instigator.
While still on probation, in spring 2022, Keller left his classroom to talk with a student who was not in crisis,investigators found. His 31 other students were left unattended and a fight broke out. One of the students was seriously injured; Keller was suspended without pay for a week and told that further misconduct could lead to dismissal.
So, when he came back to work in fall 2022, Keller was on thin ice. That’s when he asked Rierson, the principal, for permission to hire a sub to cover his class for Wednesday afternoons in January and February so he could help lead workshops for a private dance company where he is the dance director that was offering classes at a Portland elementary school. Keller had made the same request of previous Ockley Green administrators, who he said had readily agreed.
But Rierson turned him down, citing the union contract that expressly prohibits educators from working at a second job during school hours. She could find no way to justify the cost of a substitute educator, she told Keller.
District investigators say Keller performed the second job anyway, repeatedly calling in sick during the winter, always on Wednesday afternoons. When questioned about the pattern, they said, he tried to convert the sick time to unpaid leave.
His subsequent decision to fly to North Carolina to serve as a paid judge at a dance competition during school days in March 2023 after Rierson denied his request for unpaid leave seemed to be the final straw. (Keller told the board he was ill and didn’t arrive in North Carolina until Friday evening, but he could not produce flight records; district HR investigators say an official at the dance event confirmed Keller was there and judged all day Friday.)
Rierson, the district’s human resources office and, ultimately, Guerrero recommended that Keller be dismissed for insubordination, neglect of duty and inadequate performance.
SCHOOL BOARD WEIGHS IN
Under Oregon law, school board members have to sign off on a superintendent’s plan to fire a certified educator.
Dismissal of an Oregon educator who has completed the three-year probationary period is uncommon; Amy Kohnstamm, who just concluded eight years as a board member, said she could recall fewer than 10 such instances during her tenure. It is even more uncommon for the Portland Public schools board to bypass a principal’s recommendation for dismissal.
A notable exception: In 2004, the board declined to sign off on firing Zuleyma Figueroa, a LGBTQ+ Latina teacher at East Sylvan Middle School whose principal said she was unclear and disjointed in her lessons and lacked classroom management skills. Figueroa countered that students poked fun at her accent and her sexual orientation. Board members sided with Figueroa. She was moved to Benson High School, where four years later, she lost her teaching license after being convicted for dealing methamphetamine from her home.
When Keller’s case came before the board, Scott said he saw it as an open-and-shut case. In his view, Keller had misled his boss and violated his union-approved contract, not to mention gotten paid twice for the same hours while his students at Ockley Green had a revolving door of substitutes.
For DePass and the two other Black members of the school board, incoming chair Gary Hollands and incoming vice-chair Herman Greene, the situation was far less clear-cut. Why, DePass wanted to know, couldn’t the principals of Ockley Green and the elementary school have connected to work out the scheduling? Greene pressed for more details on what had changed, given that past principals had approved Keller’s requests for substitutes.
Eleven days later, at a second meeting, DePass laid her cards on the table.
“Disciplinary action is disproportionately meted out by race,” she said. “Scrutiny on Black employees in our public institutions falls disproportionately on Black men. Those outcomes impact retirement and end up in the loss of Black wealth. I think firing is too harsh of a punishment.”
Two board members attending their last-ever meeting, Kohnstamm and Eilidh Lowery, signaled they agreed with Scott. That left Brim-Edwards as the tie-breaker, to side with either her three white counterparts in favor of dismissal or her three Black fellow board members seeking a lesser punishment.
It made for some uncomfortable optics for Brim-Edwards, who was recently elected to the Multnomah County Commission to represent a wide swath of diverse East Portland.
“I have a lot of history,” said Brim-Edwards, who has been on and off the school board for more than two decades. “Black principals and teachers who are leaving the district have told me about their shared experience, and he is a Black teacher in a school with a very diverse set of students. That did inform my point of view.”
When she voted in Keller’s favor, cheers broke out from the audience.
The president of the Portland Association of Teachers, Angela Bonilla, called it an example of “the power our communities and students have to make change, and of how PPS tends to only change course when pushed/shamed in public.”
But in the aftermath of the decision, school board members said they heard from multiple principals deeply concerned about the ramifications.
“The board has some repair work to do with principals so they will know we will support them in the tough decisions they need to make while they run their schools,” Scott said.
Guerrero declined comment to the Oregonian/OregonLive. But the board’s actions could also reverberate for him.
“There were four members willing to vote against him,” DePass observed — and all four remain on the board.
Though such cases are infrequent, there’s also an open question of what happens the next time the board considers a dismissal case on similar grounds. If board members go the other way, Scott worries, they could expose the district to costly legal action.
“The precedent setting nature of this is very concerning to me. We have limited our ability as a board to terminate future teachers who engage in similar behaviors,” he said.
DePass acknowledges the potential precedent—and says she thinks it’s unlikely to be a factor in the future, given how few teachers face termination.
“We need to be applying our discipline policies equally, to everyone,” she said. “We always say, ‘Oh, we need more Black teachers.’ But we have to retain the people we have. Let’s lovingly work with the people we have.”
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com
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