A South Carolina high school teacher made headlines last Wednesday for a controversial choice of disciplinary action. On Tuesday, his school district took a vote on whether he would face disciplinary action. Under South Carolina Board of Education regulations, public school teachers facing disciplinary action or termination maintain the right to appeal the reversal of the decision before the board of their school district. In teacher Malcolm Swenson’s case, he was appealing his school administration’s decision to place him on paid leave.
Swenson, a white social studies teacher at Strom Thurmond High School in Columbia, came under fire last week for the way he chose to discipline Troy Cramer, one of his Black students. Cramer’s mother Robin alerted the school, the board of the school district, and the local press to what she called the teacher’s “shameless, boldfaced racism.”
Cramer told the Columbia Gazette that the punishment her son received for being disruptive in class was reminiscent of some of the darkest days of American racial prejudice. “I’ll grant you that Troy can be a handful,” said Cramer, “and he told me himself that he was acting out in class. I don’t care to deny that. But I do care to question the quality of authority in his school. What kind of teacher would tell a Black kid that he can only sit with other Black kids at lunch? What the hell type of punishment is that? Is it even a punishment? I can understand sending him to the principal’s office. He could’ve even made him sit with him during lunch, like a normal teacher might do. But how are you going to literally segregate my child from his white classmates?”
The Gazette also spoke with Troy himself, who is fifteen, about the situation. “It was mad racist, obviously,” he said, “but I didn’t really mind. I’ll take it over detention.”
Although he declined to speak with the Gazette last week, Swenson accepted our request for comment ahead of his Tuesday testimony before the board of Richland County School District One, a district also known as Richland One. Speaking on his decision regarding Troy, he seemed surprised that anyone had taken issue with it. “They already like hanging out with each other,” said Swenson. “They can talk about the same music, watch the same sports, say the same words. Say the same word, I should say, although I have heard some colorful variations of it recently.”
Swenson continued, “All I’m saying is that I didn’t do anything he wouldn’t have ended up doing himself. I noticed that he usually sits with two white boys and a white girl at lunch, which is fine with me, by the way. I’m no racist. Anyway, he has his group and it happens to consist of three white kids. When your kid likes TV, you discipline him by taking the TV. When your kid likes video games, you discipline him by taking his Xbox. When your kid goes out with his friends, you discipline him by grounding him. That’s all I did, isn’t it? Your kid likes the whites, so you put him with the Blacks! So he has to sit with the people who really understand him. Big whoop! That mother of his should be thanking me for keeping him ‘woke,’ as they say.”
As previously mentioned, Swenson attended a mandatory disciplinary hearing with the board of Richland One at which the justification for his ongoing leave came to a vote. As is standard procedure with the board, he was allotted fifteen minutes to give a statement before votes were taken. Swenson, determined to delay the vote, stretched his statement to a whopping nineteen hours in a display that Richland One superintendent Trevor Faulk called “not only the longest filibuster in school district disciplinary hearing history, but almost certainly the only one.” During the filibuster, which was achieved by ignoring the timekeeper’s repeated interjections in the first hour, Swenson prepared and served the board tea from a set he brought himself, read forty pages of his own printed commentary on The Dark Knight Rises, practiced reciting the alphabet backwards until he could do it inside of ten seconds, and walked the board through the most recent decisions made concerning his fantasy football team, among several other things.
In the end, the board unanimously voted that Swenson was wrongfully placed on leave and must be reinstated at once. Board member Sue Short described the hearing as “nauseating” and “pointless.” “We were always going to vote in his favor,” said Short. “If we’re not allowed to get mad when they want an all-Black study group or all-Black clubs, they’re not allowed to get mad if someone makes an all-Black lunch table. That’s just common sense. I could’ve done without watching the man practice his bongos, however.”
Article image by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.