Fired for accurately reporting student misconduct, a Minneapolis teacher is speaking out on how “wildly excessive” political correctness has gone too far.
Mary Smith, a teacher in the Minneapolis school district, and her attorney, Andrew Parker, who helped her get her job back, joined Liz Collin on her podcast.
WATCH:
Smith described how she was caught up in the perfect storm of cancel culture and woke ideology in the Minneapolis school district back in September of 2025. Until that time, she had been a veteran teacher with an unblemished record for more than 30 years. She has a master’s degree in urban education, a teaching certificate in English as a second language, and helped open a school on an Indian reservation.
On one particular day, she “witnessed and was attempting to fight back against racist conduct in the Minneapolis Public Schools” when she observed students “aggressively attacking, verbally, one another with the use of the full N-word,” her attorney said.
It was then determined that Smith would be terminated for describing what she witnessed that day.
“I never thought that by reporting what students’ behavior was, like I had done many, many times over my career in Minneapolis schools, would result in this. I would have thought that if they didn’t like how I did it or what I had written, that they would have talked to me or something, but nobody did that. It was just, I was in shock actually when they sent me home,” Smith said.
Parker said he and his client “attempted to avoid arbitration and see if the school district would reconsider what I thought was really an outrageous discipline for Mary reporting what she witnessed — not reporting anything but what she witnessed — quoting what she witnessed, and the district wasn’t interested in that.”
Parker explained how he “had to file for arbitration in order to redress the termination recommendation that had gone to the board of the Minneapolis schools.”
He also pointed out that Smith was fired “because of political correctness, because of woke culture, because of DEI, because of the failure to see the forest for the trees and even to see the actual underlying facts here.”
“The arbitrator ruled in a 45-page opinion that Mary should not have been discharged. At most, she should have been warned: don’t do it this way, do it that way, in terms of reporting and the arbitrator reinstated Mary with full pay, benefits, no loss of tenure, and a reassignment to a different school in the Minneapolis Public Schools,” he said.
The bigger picture
The Minneapolis school district faces a $40 million budget shortfall along with declining enrollment and could close more than a dozen schools. Research indicates that students in the district are nearly two grade levels below the national average in math and reading.
As a teacher with three decades of experience, Smith said, “I just feel like our priority is not really educating kids. I think there’s so many things that are just steering us away from that.”
“I’ve been in education a long time and it wasn’t like this always. And so I would say probably since even before COVID happened … these things were starting,” she said.
“We need to be focusing on reading and math and really just hammering in on those things … I just think that we need to refocus on what our real job is and that is to teach,” Smith added.
The Minneapolis school district did not respond to a request for comment from Alpha News.
Liz Collin
Liz Collin is a multi-Emmy-Award-winning investigative reporter, news anchor, and producer who cares about Minnesota. She is the producer of The Fall of Minneapolis and Minnesota v We the People documentary films, and author of the Amazon best-selling book, They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and The Death of George Floyd. Her work has prompted important state laws. Yet perhaps most of all, Liz has been giving a voice to the truth—and helping others tell their stories—for more than 20 years.
Dr. JC Chaix
Dr. JC Chaix is an editor, educator, and an expert in media studies. He wrote and directed the Alpha News documentary "The Fall of Minneapolis" and "Minnesota v We the People."
