Rachel Stonecipher

Those same stickers Dallas police have been distributing are dangerous in Irving

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

Placing Safe Space stickers on classroom doors creates an unsafe environment in a school, according the Irving ISD school board. The Safe Space stickers in question are used in a school to indicate a person may enter the room and be protected from a dangerous situation and that, should police need to be called, that person may safely wait there until help arrives.

Dallas police have been distributing Safe Space stickers since last year, along with Dallas Hope Charities. Dallas Voice has one on its door.

But in Irving schools, the school board has determined, those stickers are perceived as a danger.

The controversy over the Safe Space stickers began early this school year at Irving’s MacArthur High School.

The high school’s new principal ordered Safe Space stickers removed from classroom doors without notifying anyone that it would be happening. Three days later, one of the faculty sponsors of the Gay-Straight Alliance was removed from her classroom after questioning the action. Four days later, a second sponsor was removed from her classroom, too.

After those two teachers were removed from the school, students walked out in protest.

Rachel Stonecipher was the first GSA sponsor removed from the school. She said she heard that one teacher complained that if he didn’t have a sticker on his door, his class wouldn’t be perceived as a safe space for students.

Stonecipher said he was welcome to participate in the program, but could the problem be that the logo on the sticker includes a Pride flag? If so, she suggested, maybe his class wouldn’t be the best place for an LGBTQ student to find the open arms they needed when looking for a safe space.

MacArthur Principal Natasha Stewart responded to the protests and the walkout by insisting all spaces in Irving schools are safe spaces. And while that is certainly the goal, Stonecipher said she wondered why, if the whole school were a safe place, so many students came to her classroom to talk about bullying.

At the recent third group grievance hearing for GSA sponsors, the argument flipped.

According to a transcript of the meeting, the reason for removing stickers from doors and other items from classrooms such as Pride flags is because teachers were not reporting incidents when students came to them.

Only LGBTQ-related items were removed from classrooms. Religious items remain in Irving classrooms.

The school district accused the GSA sponsors of promising students confidentiality. In doing so, they would violate the law by not reporting abuse at home and physical bullying on school property.

But Stonecipher said nothing could be further from the truth. She said she understands the law and would report suspected abuse at home. In addition, reporting bullying is exactly what the Safe Space stickers encourage. She repeated that a student could come to her room, discuss what happened, but then report it.

“If students reported bullying, we reported it,” she said.

At the hearing, Stonecipher was asked, “So if the kid is in crisis, so to speak, you’re in class, they’re going to come to your class, whether kids were going to deal with it while their kids are in class.”

“Well, I can have that conversation outside of the class,” Stonecipher responded. “I can direct my kids very, very well and say, ‘Look, guys, I need you to be on page five and six today. I need to handle something real quick,’ and they will. They will.”

She told the grievance committee that doesn’t happen in all classes because some teachers wouldn’t be comfortable with that.

One person questioning her understood she’s had some training and experience in that sort of multi-tasking.

Another tried framing it as some teachers think they’re better than others: “So that is [saying] basically all the other teachers are not a safe …”

But Stonecipher cut her off. “Well, that is a, I think, a misperception on the part of the other teachers,” she said.

“The sticker does not mean you’re a good or a bad person. It simply means that you feel capable of having these conversations of being there for that kid, that you’re willing to do the thing where you say, ‘Hey, neighbor, watch my class for a second.’”

The grievance committee was not convinced and adopted the recommendation of its attorney that Safe Space stickers make the school’s other places unsafe and therefore should be banned.

Stonecipher said she expects that, at its April 18 meeting, the school board will propose to terminate her contract but pay her through the end of the school year in August. The second GSA sponsor who was removed from her classroom resigned earlier in the school year.

After being removed from MacArthur, Stonecipher was reassigned to Irving Secondary Reassignment Center.

She said there are normally 120 to 150 students at the school who have been placed there for 20 to 30 days at a time.

The school has smaller classes, and she said as a teacher who’s been placed there on disciplinary action, she thinks she’s made an impact on some of her students.

For some of her students, she’s found, “It’s a big deal to have a teacher that listens to you.”

Irving ISD remains one of the few school districts in Dallas County with no LGBTQ employment protections recommended by the state after the Bostock v. Clayton County employment nondiscrimination case. And the school district has no specific bullying policy or other nondiscrimination policies in place to protect LGBTQ students.