Aisha Osman is a teacher that was “triggered” by the “thin blue line” flag that was hanging in the doorway of the armed student resource officer office at her high school. She is upset that the officer from the sheriff’s office that is there to protect her was supporting police and she is now going after the School District.
There’s actually more to Osman than her just being a school teacher, she also has connections to Obama.
In a report that was picked up by the Portland Tribune written by the Beaverton Valley Times stated:
Aisha Osman made sure to quicken her pace each time she walked by the office of the school resource officer at Aloha High School.
“When I first saw that flag, I was kind of shocked because they turned a group like Black Lives Matter that’s fighting for the justice of people killed by police into Blue Lives Matter that’s just about the officers,” Osman recalled.
The flag was in the office of Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy Dylan Leach who has been assigned as the armed on-campus officer at Aloha High School and has worked for the Sheriff’s office since 2008.
In 2016, Osman wrote a letter to President Obama detailing the difficulty of growing up in a post-9/11 world and was invited to visit the first family.
“That is a once-in-a-lifetime experience I could not say no to,” Osman recalled. “What I understood was I saw the first family that actually looked like me walking down the streets of Washington, D.C., and it just made me so happy.”
Katherine Watkins who also taught at Aloha High in 2019 and advised the school’s Black Student Union first reported the flag to school officials.
“Other people of color here told me it was here, but to actually see it triggers fear in me,” Watkins told Aloha Principal Matthew Casteel in an April 2019 email exchange.
Casteel offered for Watkins to have a sit down meeting with Deputy Leach however, she refused.
“I don’t feel comfortable talking with the officer because the message is loud and clear. I can only imagine what our black students are feeling,” she told the principal.
She just didn’t want the officer to blow up her false liberal narrative.
Deputy Leach did remove the flag from his office but, the director of public safety for the school district has hung the flag in his office inside the Beaverton School District office building. When the school district was questioned they fought back and said, “The Beaverton School District does not have a policy about office decor or displays,” the district stated. “Further, the district follows the law and case law regarding the First Amendment to the United States Constitution … that protects freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and right to petition as it pertains to a public workplace and have chosen to deploy a limited, viewpoint-neutral lens when evaluating concerns regarding such displays. We rely on the professional judgment of our staff as it pertains to their teaching practice or their position within the District to make choices about where and what they display in those spaces.”
