Late last week, a Newberg resident reported that, according to a FOIA request, the Newberg Schools district office revealed that “between Jan. 2022 to early March 2023, 197 teachers and staff left Newberg schools.” This exodus represents a significant percent of Newberg Schools employees, a stunning number that reflects enormous loss for our community: All that institutional memory, gone. All that talent, scattered to nearby districts.
The current school board and superintendent have persistently said that Newberg’s losses are part of a nation-wide personnel problem, and that similar depletions of work forces happened in nearby districts, too. In claiming that educators are leaving the profession altogether, the board hopes to deflect responsibility, unwilling to consider that their own failed policies, their ethical lapses, and their politically-motivated actions have created a toxic work environment in Newberg, compelling employees (nearly 200 of them!) to flee.
But don’t take our word for it: listen to the educators’ stories, including the one we’ve reprinted below. The teacher works in the district, but because they fear recrimination and harassment, they’ve asked that their story be published anonymously. “Before the board and its advocates critique me for ‘living in fear,’” they write, “perhaps consider who created, cultivated, and capitalized on that very fear.”
Here’s their perspective. In particular, the teacher is talking about Brown’s statement made at a school board meeting and available here.
In the past year and a half, Chair Dave Brown has repeated sentiments we can trace back to at least August 10, 2021. At a board meeting that night, Brown made several statements that danced around the issue of why our district faced public backlash, taking the Zoom-call stage and to talk about division, politics, the value of hard work, and the content of our hearts. While he has vocalized these ideas, I have yet to see Brown live any of them out as the School Board Chair. He’s claimed to focus on maintaining high standards and pushing for “hard work and no excuses” from our staff and students.
Any educator, regardless of title, would likely agree that our students need to be challenged to work hard, to an extent. Our students deserve to be held to a high standard of academic achievement because we know they are capable of it. In fact, a trauma-sensitive educator will tell you students need healthy cognitive challenges to push them to work hard in order to develop resilience, self-efficacy, and academic success. We know people rise to the challenge when it’s presented to them, and we know our students need scaffolds – or intentionally planned supports – to fulfill the challenge.
Most educators will not, however, tell you that Brown’s approach has been effective.
What he calls excuses, we call barriers. While he writes off the trauma and difficult circumstances of our students as excuses, our educators are working with students to reach a point of physiological safety so they can learn. If you walk into any entry-level education course, you’ll learn right away about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and other similar models. These models show the importance of physical and psychological safety before we’re able to process new information and learn. If a student does not feel safe and cared for, their ability to develop skills and take on cognitive challenges will be severely inhibited. Our educators are working non-stop to create the conditions where students can feel safe in order to learn.
All the while, this Board, under Brown’s leadership, has created an environment where many students can’t work hard. Rather, this Board has been detrimental to students by placing the weight of problems on the shoulders of children and adolescents. As Brown said in August 2021, “As a country, I feel like we’re trying to bring a lot of adult and grown up battles into the classroom.” Last year, as the school board was pushing for their flag ban, facing multiple lawsuits, firing a trusted superintendent, I watched as my students’ shoulders sagged under the weight. I maintained my standards; I knew my students were capable of deep, complex thought.
But I never had board-directed support about the high expectations in my classroom. Instead, I saw more and more students requesting to take a break. To go to the counseling office. To take a lap. As the chaos spiraled, so did the behaviors of the very students who were struggling to bear the weight of what Brown calls “grown-up battles.”
Students of color shared fear of racism and bigoted remarks as they walked through the halls. LGBTQIA+ students, the ones who shared their identities with others, expressed fear of bullying and harassment. And we can only guess how many closeted students, especially students of color, feared being outed or even uttering their identity.
These bans and policy moves, in Newberg and across the country, are not about “protecting children.” They’re about protecting power and control out of fear of something people don’t understand. If it was about protecting children, we’d look at what they need to grow and thrive in developmentally appropriate ways. Instead, we’re breaking down the safety of our schools for our students – regardless of background and identity – in order to create a political arena. We strip our buildings of safety, making hard work impossible and risking the developmental progress of our students.
All of the work to create a productive learning environment for my students in my classroom was, and is, limited to the resources I have available between my team and my own means. All of the work to create space for students to have “hard work and no excuses” was my own, and was undermined every time the Board met. As a teacher, I work with students on a daily basis to promote “hard work and no excuses.” My students know they will be compassionately held accountable, given space to make mistakes while also being responsible for those mistakes. Excuses are not allowed, but explanations are. Hard work and high standards only work when we have compassion.
But from Dave Brown? I have yet to see him live out what he said at the start of the chaos he helped stir up and led the charge on. Standards? Hard work? Compassion? Nope. But excuses? Again, and again, and again. It’s always someone else. The old superintendent, the teachers’ union, the “liberal” board members who stepped down, the media. Probably me, if he ever reads this. And yet, I have yet to see him take responsibility for the ways his reckless leadership has harmed this district financially, academically, professionally, and – for our remaining staff and students – mentally and emotionally. Dave Brown and I, on the surface, agree about the importance of high standards and hard work. We clearly disagree, however, on what these look like.
For him, it means removing psychological safety from schools and lowering the standards of our district. (Or maybe we hired B&B so their poor grammar and inability to credit staff members with their own names would make our elementary-school students seem more impressive?) It means ignoring research and best practices designed to support student well-being and success in and out of the classroom.
It means vilifying the professional and revered educators and leaders in his own district in order to push his own agenda. It means instilling fear in educators so they’re afraid of speaking out, trying new strategies, or teaching their board-approved curriculum for fear of retaliation and public harassment.
It means taking away student identity and autonomy in the name of “colorblindness” and “removing politics” from schools. It means criticizing the expertise of staff members, pushing many out of his district because he refused to follow his own suggestion of listening to people and preventing division.
It means blaming our educators for the mass exodus of students and extraordinary financial losses this district has faced at his hands. It means smearing the blood he has coated his hands in on the educators and leaders who have worked to triage an entire school district.
With his own criteria at the forefront, Dave Brown has failed on all accounts. Our educators are all hard working. Brown is all excuses.
Do you work in the Newberg school district or did the Newberg school board compel you to leave this district? We would love to hear your story, and can publish it anonymously on our site. Your voices, and your words, matter to us, and to the transformation of our school board. Feel free to email us at
betternsdschoolboard@gmail.com.
Newberg deserves better. Your vote on May 16 matters.
Newberg Neighbors for a Better Community 