Oregon’s Portland Association of Teachers is pursuing a labor grievance against Portland Public Schools over the removal of “Stop the Genocide” signs from a high school classroom.

PAT President Angela Bonilla told The Oregonian in a statement a district policy against teachers posting personal or political messages that required administrators to remove the posters from a Grant High School social studies teachers’ doorway in early September “violates our collective bargaining agreement,” and added “In addition, it is unworkable, overly broad and vague.”

The PPS policy, adopted in August, follows a districtwide uproar last spring over a PAT guide for teachers that advocated for Palestinian statehood, and included lessons urging students to pray to Allah and urge President Joe Biden to cease military funding to Israel.

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The PAT push for Palestine also involved a pro-Palestine meeting that encouraged union members to display Palestinian flags in their classrooms, to wear t-shirts that read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is considered anti-Semitic by Jews who view it as a call to eliminate Israel, National Review reports.

The guide, published by Oregon Educators for Palestine in collaboration with PAT, suggests students learn “Palestinian resistance is a political struggle for self-determination against colonial and apartheid rule.”

The guide does not include reference to Hamas’ grip on Gaza, its Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, or the group’s designation by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization. Instead, if focuses on framing Israel as “settler colonialism.”

“Zionist settler colonization of Palestine has been widely compared to settler colonialism in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere,” it reads.

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The guide, along with supplement, offer lessons for students from preschool through high school.

Of course, the PAT guide isn’t sitting well with Portland’s Jewish population.

Rabbi David Kosak told The Oregonian its aim is to “inculcate and indoctrinate” students, “laying the groundwork for ever increasing amounts of hatred of Jews.”

Bonilla said the union is “vehemently against any forms of bigotry, including antisemitism.”

PAT’s labor grievance alleges the district’s policy against personal or political messages conflicts with language in the union’s collective bargaining agreement on “academic freedom”. The provisions protect teachers’ ability to broach controversial topics, and to post union materials in schools, she told The Oregonian.

The union is urging members to take pictures of materials in classrooms, hallways and cafeterias to document how the new policy, which requires administrative approval for posting in common spaces, is being enforced.

Parents, meanwhile, seem to support the district’s policy.

“If someone complains that it makes it hard for them to be in a learning environment, then those things should come down,” Grant High School parent Shoshana Kedem told the news site. “If there were Israeli flags and signs about supporting the occupation, I think people would say the same thing.”

District officials told KOIN they had been working on the policy against personal and political messages since 2023 to deal with art, and stressed that some displays are still considered acceptable.

“The rainbow flag and BLM poster are district-approved symbols of inclusion to often marginalized students,” a PPS statement read. “Posters advocating for specific positions on political positions are not student-centered in that they are not rooted in our educational mission.”