A former St. Paul teacher broke her silence this week after being forced to resign in 2019 for an incident at her school. A 15-second video clip cost her a 30-year career and her reputation.
In it, she quotes a student who used a racial slur while she informed her superiors about the situation.
Corporate media painted Wendy Brilowski a racist without all of the facts, she said on Liz Collin Reports.
She believes her story speaks to cancel culture, the danger of viral videos with no context, and to corporate media and their “dangerous” agenda.
In 2019, Brilowski worked as a social studies teacher in the Spanish Immersion Program at Highland Park Middle School in St. Paul. She explained that a student had ongoing “behavioral issues” in her class. Brilowski had multiple conversations with the student’s mother, who acknowledged “her daughter was difficult.”
“In conversation with her mother, we figured out that the girl was upset because she was tired of seeing black people portrayed in a negative manner. The unit we were in was the slavery, civil war, and reconstruction unit, so I totally understood that and offered to reverse the curriculum and teach the civil rights movement before teaching the slavery unit to show the positives that had come out of the struggles. It would have involved a lot of work with the curriculum director, but I was willing to make that change and the mom said no, that wasn’t necessary,” Brilowski explained.
“I later found out that the student was also quite upset that I kept using the (Spanish) word negros. It was Spanish immersion. It’s culturally appropriate. So, this goes on and it builds for a while,” she added.
The student was pulled out of Brilowski’s class for a couple of weeks by the assistant principal.
“All of a sudden she showed back up in my class. She came in, sat down next to her friends, started talking with her friends, pulled out her cellphone. I took one look at the situation and assessed it, and I was kind of terrified. I didn’t want to push any buttons. So I really calmly said, ‘Could you please put your cellphone face down on the table?’ Usually, we ask them to put it on their desk or they weren’t supposed to have them out at all, but you pick and choose your battles. All of a sudden, she just stood up, exploded. Her chair went flying. She shoved the tables. She started yelling. She shoved through a whole bunch of other kids in the room and stormed out into the hallway,” Brilowski said.
Brilowski said she called the office for help, and it took them 10 minutes to respond.
“By the time he got there, I was like, I was totally distraught. I had over 40 kids, half in the hallway, half in the classroom, no control, so I didn’t know what he knew. I whispered to him what she had said, which was to use a very foul term. I was also in such shock; I couldn’t believe that she had used the term, and it was a word that I have never in my life used. I never even heard that growing up. It was just not a term to be acknowledged,” she said.
Brilowski then repeated what her student had just said when help arrived in her class.
“I just walk around the room and pick on them cause they’re black. They’re the only f****** n****** doing any work,” she can be heard saying in the video clip.
Another staff member can be heard replying, “She’s repeating what you’re saying” after Brilowski spoke.
Instead of showing the full context, local media pounced on the story and one station edited out the “repeating what you’re saying” reference altogether.
St. Paul Superintendent Joe Gothard put out a statement that day apologizing for what happened. Brilowski said he did that “before anyone actually asked me what was going on.”
Alpha News reached out for comment from St. Paul Public Schools on how it handled the situation. A spokesperson told us the district does not comment on personnel matters.
“No one ever tried to contact me. At the end of the day, my principal came into the office and told me to go home. Later that night, she called me up and said, ‘Don’t come back to school.’ On the news that night, I saw the story and was just completely, totally shocked that it had made the news. Without anybody contacting me,” Brilowski said.
She ended up resigning after meeting with her union, which she says told her that if she fought it, she would lose her teaching license and her pension.
“They wanted me to fade away,” she said. “In the end, the licensing board decided to not even take the case on. They said it was obvious that I had not used these words, and that I was repeating what the student had said and I was allowed to keep both my teaching license and my K-12 principal’s license.
“The falsified 15 second video clip that went out destroyed my career of over 30 years. I was hired by another district and had alluded to what had happened. I figured it was in the news, they must’ve known. And then I was immediately fired. I tried to become a substitute teacher and the on-call substitute company said I was not employable. I tried to get a job with a temporary staffing agency. Again, I was told I’m not employable. The only kind of work I could get was like selling windows at the state fair. We lost 60% of our income immediately. It was devastating. I lost the ability to spend several more years contributing to my pension fund. It has been truly devastating and life changing for my entire family,” she said.
“Journalism should be there for good, to do good in society and not to destroy people’s lives. And it did destroy mine. In this, all of the cancel culture, everything that’s going on, the divisiveness in society at some point in time, this just needs to end.
“That had been the ongoing history with my several years that I taught in St. Paul schools is that, you know, teachers just weren’t listened to. It was always kind of our fault or our thing to deal with. There were never any solutions.”
LISTEN:
Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
