A welcoming school isn’t political. West Ada school board is distracting from education | Opinion

If you’ve managed to generate a national controversy in your school district over the phrase “Everyone is welcome here,” you’ve messed up.

In recent weeks, there have been national headlines about the West Ada School District ordering a teacher to remove a sign displaying that phrase along with hands of various skin tones. Parents have been rightly outraged, spoken out about it and held protests. A large group of students at one of the district’s high schools organized a walkout.

That’s a whole lot of distraction from education, entirely whipped up by the district’s unnecessary actions — which is ironic, because the supposed purpose of the policy is to ensure students have a distraction-free educational environment.

As the Idaho Statesman’s Rose Evans reported, the controversy over classroom signs stretches back to January, when there was a minor flare-up on social media in response to a bulletin board in an elementary classroom that featured a rainbow and hands of a range of skin tones, along with messages such as “be kind,” “you matter” and the now-infamous “everyone is welcome here.”

Only someone who is ludicrously sex-obsessed could see a sign with a rainbow and a series of welcoming statements in an elementary school as somehow sexual. But such people abound on social media, and some made a series of angry posts about it. Unusually, the West Ada school board’s social media account quickly posted a promise that the trustees would remove the poster, and by the next day, it was gone.

“This was a distraction,” Trustee David Binetti wrote in an email about the incident, Evans reported. “And I know it was a distraction because we were all being distracted by it. … The environment is now free from that distraction.”

Think about the lesson this pattern of behavior teaches: Any time there’s a minor outburst of silliness on social media, that’s a distraction and so you should immediately cave to whatever the demand is, no matter how ridiculous.

Remember when we thought cancel culture was a bad thing? It seems West Ada has turned it into an implicit district policy, which will harm students.

Keep up that pattern, and the board will foster a culture where students are exposed to as little controversy as possible. It will raise students into adults with no understanding of the world around them — except to be very, very careful what you say, because saying the wrong thing meets with swift punishment, even statements as utterly anodyne as “everyone is welcome here.”

Students themselves realize that what the district is doing is bad for them, which is why there was a walkout at Renaissance High School.

But it’s worse than that. Because eliminating distractions from education isn’t actually the policy, is it?

However distracting a few malcontents on social media calling teachers groomers is, becoming the center of a national firestorm is infinitely more distracting. But in the face of student walkouts and widespread outrage from parents and teachers, suddenly the board has dug in its heels and won’t give a millimeter.

The sign will go. If parents chalk the same sign on the school district’s sidewalk, bring out the power washers.

It seems the board is uniquely sensitive to outrage from the right. If people are mad because they think a sign welcomes gay people or people with dark skin, that’s a problematic distraction. If a whole bunch more people are mad because they think the board is teaching their kids to reject people unlike them, that’s the cost of doing business.

The revealed policy of the board — the one you can infer not from what it says but what it does — isn’t seeking to keep classrooms content-neutral or resisting the politicization of education. It certainly isn’t excluding things that distract from education.

By ginning up this controversy, this enormous distraction to education, board members have let down the thousands of kids whose education is entrusted to them. They have failed in their core duties.

It’s a terrible shame — one voters should remember the next time there’s a school board election.

This story was originally published March 25, 2025 at 11:00 AM.