Tallahassee Principal Faced Ultimatum over Multiple Issues, Not Just Statue of David Lesson Complaints, Official Says

A Tallahassee charter school board chair said Thursday that he presented an employment ultimatum to a principal for multiple reasons rather than just complaints about a Statue of David lesson, as she has reportedly suggested.

Tallahassee Classical School Principal Hope Carrasquilla resigned at a school board meeting on Monday, the Tallahassee Democrat’s Ana Goñi-Lessan reported. While no reason was given for her departure, she said that School Board Chair Barney Bishop provided her with an ultimatum of resigning or being terminated and that she suspects it derived from a sixth-grade art lesson involving the Statue of David.

The statue is a naked depiction of the biblical hero David, which Michelangelo sculpted between 1501 and 1504 during the renaissance.

Three parents shared complaints that their children were upset by the lesson, which also featured “the ‘Creation of Adam’ fresco painting and Boticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus,'” as Goñi-Lessan wrote. Two of the parents believed that the school should have alerted them to the curriculum ahead of time, Carrasquilla said. The other parent complained that the material was pornographic.

While Bishop acknowledged that he provided the educator with an ultimatum, he did not elaborate on the reasons, citing advice from the school’s legal counsel, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

He did, however, speak with Slate’s Dan Kois about the lesson in question, stating the ultimatum “wasn’t about that one issue” and that the former principal was aware of that. He also noted that even though the vast majority of parents took no issue with the lesson, the school administrators failed in their obligation to alert parents beforehand:

Dan, 98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with it. But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice. We have a practice. Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: In class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice.

Answering a follow-up from Kois, Bishop added:

This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice. Look, we’re not a public school. We’re a public charter. Parents, after they saw all the crap that’s being taught in public schools during COVID, decided of their own that they didn’t want their children to be taught that. Here we teach the Hillsdale Curriculum, focusing on civic and moral values. We teach a traditional, Western civilization, liberal classical education. And if there’s controversial topics or subjects, we tell parents in advance. We’re going to be sensitive to everybody at the school.

Carrasquilla admitted that parents should have been notified of the forthcoming lesson and said lapses in communication between the administrators, including herself, resulted in the error, per the Tallahassee Democrat.

She also accused Bishop of  being “more concerned about litigation and appeasing a small minority of parents, rather than trusting my expertise as an educator for more than 25 years.”