Last January, 17-year-old Traci Francis, a rising senior at South Portland High School, walked out of her sociology class after her teacher used a racial slur to introduce a lesson.
The teacher, Samantha Matoian, “started class off with the topic on whether or not people are born racist or not, and proceeded to tell a story about a young white boy who saw a Black newscaster on the TV. Ms. Matoian told us that the boy pointed at television and said the n-word, but instead of saying ‘n-word,’ she said the actual word,” Francis, who has a Black father and white mother, wrote in a letter to the school board seven weeks after the incident.
“Everyone was staring at me, knowing how angry I was without even saying a word, it was uncomfortable,” she wrote. “Chatter started to fill the room, and Matoian asked if another student had cracked a joke, she truly had no idea what she had done wrong.”
After the incident, Francis met with South Portland High School principal Michele LaForge and vice-principal Kimberlee Bennett, who she said were both supportive. They called the teacher in to speak with her.
“[Bennett] told me that at arrival, Matoian had no idea why she was called down, and couldn’t think of anything that she had done in class that would have offended any of her students,” Francis wrote. “And when she was told why she was there, she admitted to having said this word for years in her lessons, which, Ms. Bennett told me, was appalling to her as she had no idea.”
Matoian apologized the next day when Francis was absent and apologized again soon after when Francis was present.
But Francis thought the apology was insincere. A family friend, Garrett Stewart, a labor organizer and commissioner on Maine’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous and Maine Tribal Populations, encouraged her to write the letter describing the incident to the school board.
Now, as Francis prepares to begin her senior year, she and her family say they are angry that the administration has been slow to respond to the incident publicly in one of Maine’s most diverse school districts.
‘We do not bring other people’s pain into our classrooms’
South Portland High School student Traci Francis, center, leads a demonstration in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in June. | Katie Conley
Francis and her family say that this is not the first time a racial slur has been used in a South Portland classroom.
Francis’ older sister Toia and step sister Jessica Swett said they had also heard Matoian use the n-word when they were at South Portland High School, though neither could recall the context. Toia said she did not tell her family at the time because she did not want to make waves.
In 2018, students and parents raised alarm after white students at South Portland’s Memorial Middle School were seen using the n-word in a video uploaded to social media.
Prior to the January incident, principal LaForge began the 2019-2020 school year by announcing that faculty could not use racial slurs in their instruction, such as reading from books, or reciting a quote, regardless of context.
“What I said was, ‘Do not use the n-word in your classes,’” she said. “I said it on the very first day of school, in the first 15 minutes of the meeting.”
LaForge said her announcement was not specifically prompted by previous accusations against Matoian or other faculty.
She said she told teachers, “‘If you have a reason to use the n-word in your classroom — you’ve been doing this for years as part of your curriculum — you cannot do it. We do not bring other people’s pain into our classrooms.’”
“I had interviewed everybody when I started,” said LaForge, who started at South Portland High School in 2018. “One of the things I heard from teachers is, ‘We want to do this right, with our more and more diverse student body.’”
‘In order for it not to continue, we need to name the problem’
In March, two months after the incident in the sociology class, Francis and her mother, Rani McLeod, met with South Portland School District Superintendent Ken Kunin. He agreed to write a letter to the community addressing the incident. But, as the district was in the middle of transitioning to online learning as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Maine, they all agreed the message would get lost amidst the emergency.
Kunin agreed to address it before the end of the school year. The family urged him to respond in early June as protests against the police killing of George Floyd had the community’s attention.
“I’m really proud of students who have stepped forward to help us in that process and to continue to hold us accountable,” Kunin said of South Portland’s response to and support for the racial justice protests.
On June 8, Kunin sent an email to parents with children in the school district about the protests and vaguely referenced the January incident, saying that racist language would not be tolerated by staff or students.
But Francis and McLeod told Kunin that the message did not explicitly name the problem.
“The June 8 letter wasn’t as specific as they would have liked,” Kunin said. He told the family that, since the school year was to end soon, it would be more impactful to address it head-on at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year.
He has shared a draft of that unreleased letter with Francis and McLeod and solicited their feedback.
“I want to be clear that inappropriate language that demeans others based on race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, religion or other protected characteristics under the law and which most find offensive, is not and will not be tolerated from staff or students,” the draft reads.
Francis and McLeod told Kunin that this was still insufficient.
“We are not asking you to name a specific individual in a public document, but we are asking that you acknowledge, with as much detail as possible, the incidents that continue to take place in the high school, with repeated incidents of staff members using the n-word in full, and a lack of follow-up on the damage this creates,” they wrote to Kunin in an email. “This keeps happening, year after year, and we seek your assurance that it will not continue. In order for it not to continue, we need to name the problem.”
Kunin declined to say if any disciplinary actions had been taken against Matoian.
“We investigate to try to be fair to whoever is being accused of something. When we find that somebody has violated our policies — and it is a violation of our policy to use the n-word in class in any way, shape or form — the consequence, depending on the record, can be anything up to and including termination,” he said.
Matoian addressed the incident in an email to Beacon.
“I teach a unit on race and in a class, last January, the lesson I was attempting to teach was intentionally anti-racist to inform students of the roots of racism and its impact on society,” Matoian wrote. “I recited a true story, in which a preschooler used the ‘n’ word. I was trying to create an environment in the class where students could understand the true impact of the word and why it’s wrong. However, after this incident and reflection, I understand that even though I was teaching a lesson about the depravity of racism, reciting a racial slur as part of a story was wrong and insensitive on my part. I sincerely regret my decision and its effect on all the students. As an educator, I am continually learning so I can best support my students and this is a lesson I won’t forget. I advocate equality, tolerance and acceptance in the classroom and I never meant to cause anyone harm.”
Students push for change, administration admits systemic failings
Traci Francis, center, with sister Toia and brother Aidan.
In schools across Maine, students and alumni have come forward in the wake of the George Floyd protests to demand accountability from their school administrations to address institutional racism and the bias of educators and their curriculum.
On June 23, Bangor Daily News reported the accounts of five Black students who shared their daily experiences with racism at Bangor High School.
The next day, The Portland Press Herald reported that Portland Public Schools were taking allegations of harassment and discrimination seriously after a former Deering High School student took to social media to solicit feedback from faculty and students about the school’s record of ignoring racist incidents when students of color came forward. The student received dozens of messages.
Kunin, who was the principal of Deering High School from 2004 to 2010, said that the South Portland School District is attempting to respond to the call for racial equity and accountability in their school system.
Students of color now make up 28 percent of the district’s student body, compared to 16 percent when Kunin began as superintendent five years ago. The number of Black students has grown from 3 to 12 percent during his tenure.
“We were already then three times more diverse than the rest of Maine with about 16 percent of our students being non-white,” Kunin said.
During the same period, the district’s staff has remained mostly white.
“We need to diversify, and we need our teaching staff to look more like our students and they don’t,” he said. “That is a dramatic shortcoming of ours.”
In 2018, Kunin reached out to the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium for guidance. The nonprofit policy research center that assesses educational access has previously responded to racist incidents in schools in Portland and Kennebunk. The consortium enlisted the Center for Educational Equity (CEE) last year to interview students, faculty and the community about racial equity in the school district and produce recommendations.
Kunin said he did not call in the organization in response to a specific incident.
In 2005, during his tenure at Deering High School, he called for a similar racial equity audit and made the final report available to the public.
“I just felt like the school was changing and diversifying and the school wasn’t really prepared for it,” Kunin said of Deering. “There were things that they reported back that were not what one would want to hear as a principal.”
“I hope it leads to the new hiring practices,” LaForge said of the expected CEE report. “I hope it leads to us reviewing our policy and looking at our structural and institutional bias — which I have no doubt there is.”
New demands for public accountability
Now, Francis and her family are calling for Kunin to release a timeframe for when the racial equity audit will be complete and to reveal the recommendations and action plan for improvement. He has agreed to release the findings publicly.
Francis said she believes her teacher does not deserve a warning, or another chance to get caught in the act.
Francis, who is president of the class of 2021 for the third year, last month helped organize a protest in solidarity with Black Lives Matter with other South Portland High School students. She said she has persisted in demanding accountability from the school board and superintendent to protect her younger brother, Aidan.
“My younger brother will arrive at [South Portland High School] next year as a freshman, and I want to make this school the safest place possible before I have to leave. Having teachers that spew hate and radiate ignorance is not what I would call a safe place at all,” she wrote in her letter to the school board.
She pushes back against the criticism that the students pushing for accountability from their educational institutions are over-sensitive.
“I do not see my generation as sensitive whatsoever, and we are some of the most accepting people of not only other ethnic communities, but the LGBTQ+ community as well,” Francis wrote. “We are fighters, and we aren’t settling for anything less than justice, but is this really something I should be fighting for within my school?”
Top photo: Traci Francis speaks at a Black Lives Matter rally in South Portland in June. | Katie Conley
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