Editor’s note: This story mentions a racial slur that can be disturbing or triggering.
Teachers at Luther Burbank High School have said that their colleague who administered a biology exam that contained bigoted questions may have felt empowered by the fact that similar behavior by other staff members has historically gone unchecked at the school.
A few weeks prior to finals, Assistant Principal Antoine Germany gave a public speech about Erinn Leone in light of winning 2024 Teacher of the Year. Between glowing praise about her work in the past five years, Germany referenced an encounter Leone, who is Black, had in her first year of teaching in which a colleague repeatedly used the N-word in front of her.
Eyewitnesses said the teacher who used the slur was present at the staff meeting and was visibly upset following Germany’s speech. Later, Germany said he was told that administrators were not allowed to reference, even in the most vague terms, any employee matter that human resources staff have adjudicated. He was asked by the district human relations department not to return for the last week of school.
“For context, this exam was given in June, after Mr. Germany’s remarks at the staff meeting in May–thus vindicating the heart of Mr. Germany’s antiracist message,” history teacher Chris Zamora wrote in his letter to district and union leaders. “How is it that, at an urban California school, a teacher could be this profoundly confident with memorializing their racism into written words on an exam? I suspect that had Ms. Leone’s experience been dealt with properly, emphatically, and restoratively, this would have never happened.”
What happened in the teacher’s lounge
On Feb. 6, 2020, Leone met with her teacher cohort for a training session. When she entered the room, her colleague stood up and asked if she could vent to everyone. Leone said that it seemed serious because the teacher was visibly upset.
“My presence in the room seemed to have triggered her,” Leone said.
This teacher described an altercation with a student that occurred just before the meeting. In the middle of class, a student walked by their open classroom door and yelled “what’s up (N-word)?”
“What right does (the student) have to call me that?” the teacher, who is not Black, asked the other teachers.
The teacher relayed that they had directed the slur back at the student. “I said that’s what you are.”
Leone interjected, asking the teacher what right they had to say that to a student.
“I was thrown off because I had just entered the meeting and she’s using the N-word with the hard ‘R,’” Leone said.
Leone said that she was met with pushback from other teachers in the room who told her that she was misconstruing the teacher’s intent.
The teacher was encouraged to repeat their story from the beginning, saying that she responded to the student by shouting “no, you’re the (N-word).”
“It seemed like she was trying to garner sympathy from her colleagues,” Leone said. “She’s just going on, saying ‘he’s the (N-word), I’m not an (N-word).’”
Leone became increasingly upset as the teacher continued to repeat the slur. She said that no one confronted the teacher about her repeated use of the word and that she started to feel like her presence in the meeting was a bigger issue than the teacher who was ranting.
“People in the staff meeting were looking at me as if I’m shouting the N-word in the staff meeting,” Leone said. “I didn’t do anything unprofessional, I didn’t have a huge reaction or any of those things.”
Leone retreated to her classroom in tears. Two teachers, Lara Hoekstra and Kimberly Rodriguez, followed Leone to check on her. Hoekstra corroborated Leone’s recounting of the meeting.
“It was horrific,” she said. “While I do not believe (the teacher) was calling Leone that word, (they) clearly didn’t see a problem in using that word over and over.”
Later that day, Leone was asked into Principal Jim Peterson’s office to talk about what happened.
“When I think back about this, I remember I didn’t do anything wrong, but I felt like being a Black person in that space made this ‘Leone’s issue,’” she said.
After the meeting with Peterson, Germany escorted Leone back to her classroom.
He was empathetic and apologized, but told Leone that based on his experience being a Black educator in the district for the previous 20 years, he knew nothing was going to happen as a result of this incident.
“I remember talking to Leone about it, trying to comfort her, but I said ‘look, this is a situation where it’s probably not going to have a good outcome,’” Germany said. “I was trying to prepare her for that.”
According to district personnel records, the teacher was placed on immediate paid administrative leave.
The next day, Leone was supposed to attend some Black History Month activities that she organized, but had to forgo the event to participate in a “restorative circle” with the other teachers present at the meeting the day before. The teacher who used the slur was not in attendance.
When the teacher returned the following week, Leone said that Peterson asked her to participate in another restorative circle, this time with the returning teacher. She was told that the teacher, whose first language is not English, did not know that it was wrong of her to say the slur. Leone was asked to put together a presentation demonstrating why the word was offensive to Black people.
The trauma of the initial event and the subsequent burden that others placed on her to address the issue made the first-year teacher physically ill. She was disappointed that the issue became more about everyone’s feelings regarding the event and less about how racism affects the school environment.
“Racism hurts all of us. Our school community is being harmed by this,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘let’s just restore the harm with Miss Leone,’ — we all need to be a part of this work. Racism is socially transmitted and it’s transmitted in situations like this where teachers can tell a student he’s the N-word and they never question whether teachers should be allowed to speak to you in this way. As the historian, as the one who studies social studies, I didn’t want it to be my issue, I wanted everyone to realize how this impacts our students, their subconscious and their ideas about themselves.”
According to emails, this conference was supposed to take place March 17, but the school ceased on-campus operations the day before due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference was never rescheduled, and no other efforts to address what happened were made.
A few months later, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer led to a national reckoning with systems of institutionalized racism and violence. Sacramento City Unified was one of many school districts to release a statement in response to Floyd’s death, committing to dismantling racist ideas and practices.
In several emails to district board members and administrators that summer, Leone brought up the unresolved incident again, writing that she was offering a “second opportunity to examine their role in confronting racism within our school district.”
“Any teacher who sees their students as ‘(N-word)’ does not deserve to work in our district,” she wrote. “Any teacher who feels it is appropriate to shout such an egregious racial slur during a staff meeting does not deserve to teach our children or serve our community. (The teacher) should be removed from (their) position, a public apology should be given, and the district must truly commit to dismantling racism in our school system.”
Leone never heard back from any board members or administrators.
The speech that got the vice principal sent home
Germany referenced the racial slur incident in his May speech to honor Leone’s recognition as teacher of the year.
He felt it was important to talk about how she overcame this event early in her career at Luther Burbank to flourish into the educator she is today.
“I wanted to acknowledge the hardships that she had to overcome, it’s a miracle that she’s still here after the things she has endured,” Germany said. “I said that I got to know Leone through trauma bonding when there was an incident where a staff member in a meeting used a hateful, racist slur right in front of her.”
Germany, who was an English teacher in 2020, said he promised Leone that if he was ever in the position to do so, he would do all he could to address or prevent situations like these as they came up.
But it wasn’t long until he learned some staff members were hurt by his speech. He was asked by the district human relations department not to return for the last week of school.
Germany suspects that he didn’t receive formal disciplinary action due to his then-status as a substitute administrator.
Multiple people present at the staff meeting confirmed that Germany did not name the teacher and did not mention any identifying details. Zamora, a teacher in attendance, said that he was not aware that the offending teacher was in the room.
“My thoughts were, ‘oh great, he wants to create an environment and culture where these things don’t happen,” Zamora said. “I was surprised to hear going into break that there were some disciplinary measures considered against him for these comments.”
In a letter to the teachers union, English teacher Lara Hoekstra expressed a similar sentiment.
“I did not interpret his statement about doing something about racism as a direct attack against teachers,” she wrote. “I heard him saying, and I do not believe I am alone in my interpretation, that he had vowed to work against systemic and institutional racism that allows a teacher of color to be assaulted by racial slurs in a school meeting and yet have to face that person on campus every day, knowing nothing of substance was ever done to rectify the wrong that was caused.”
Why the racial-slur incident can’t be discussed
When the offensive biology test became public, Leone worried that the teacher wouldn’t adequately be held accountable for his actions based on the way the teacher who used racial slurs in her presence was not disciplined.
The teacher who gave the test, Alex Nguyen, has been put on administrative leave and the district’s human relations department is still investigating the matter.
Leone and colleagues Zamora and Hoekstra are also concerned about how the administrative processes after these incidents make addressing racist behavior difficult or impossible.
The teachers association’s contract says that administrative criticisms of a member should be conducted in a private conference and directed only to the teachers involved. This rule is common in union contracts and can protect workers from feeling bullied in their work environment.
Leone, Zamora and Hoekstra take issue with this provision as it relates to teachers who have harmed others. The latter two wrote letters to district and union leaders to express their frustration with these processes.
“The threat of punitive action for Mr. Germany’s comments should be seen as a relevant example of institutional racism; and had punitive measures been implemented, they would have further undermined my trust in the district/union’s ability to protect antiracist pedagogy in my own classroom,” Zamora wrote.
Germany feltangry and saddened that his speech celebrating Leone and committing himself to antiracism was co-opted by the perpetrator of harm who shifted the narrative to make herself into the victim. Part of the reason he transitioned to an administrative role was to advance racial equity within the school. As a Black student and later one of the few Black teachers at Luther Burbank, he rarely had anyone seeking to protect him.
“I have a very similar background to our students and I believe that there’s no point in being in a position of authority if you’re not going to use it for good,” he said.
He said he is frustrated with the way that real life practices conflict with the district’s and union’s goal of creating an equitable environment.
“It becomes difficult for people that are trying to influence change because there are institutional barriers around it,” he said. “We all want an antiracist environment, but practically speaking the way these things work actually limits or harms doing anything proactive to advance those causes.”
