Former West High Principal Argues Case 1 Year After Losing Job

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Former West High School principal Ford White and his attorneys defended his state education license before the Utah Board of Education on Thursday.

White was fired in November 2019 for taking students home who appeared to be intoxicated rather than calling police. He had a teacher follow him in another vehicle.

The move led students to rally in support of their principal, even as he lost his job.

Those three students whom White drove home have all gone on to college this year, and all of them received scholarships.

Though the incident happened nearly one year ago, White hasn’t had the opportunity to tell his story.

That changed Thursday as his attorneys used the national landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in their defense.

White’s defense centers around HB 239, which was designed “to improve the juvenile justice system by expanding and strengthening effective early intervention and diversion, standardizing responses to reduce disparities based on race, ethnicity and geography, and reserving system resources for those youth who pose the highest risk to public safety,” according to the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice.

“If you’re going to be serious about HB 239, if you are going to be serious about ending the school-to-prison pipeline, we’ve got to be better,” White said.

His attorneys said White took HB 239 off paper and put it into practice at West High School, implementing restorative justice for students.

“Restorative justice means you don’t call the cops for every problem at your school,” attorney Summer Osburn said. “Restorative justice means that you get down with your boots on the ground and you make community, family and student personal contacts that you can then use to address these kinds of problems.”

She said White’s team believe forces against the former principal and restorative justice are to blame for his removal – and they believe HB 239 is historical in much the same way that Brown v. Board of Education was more than 50 years ago.

“It sad we have to end segregation in the schools,” Osburn said. “And just like we can imagine that some principals in the South of America during that time immediately were eager to integrate their schools but met with local and entrenched politics and forces that didn’t actually want them to do what the federal government wanted to do, we be live Ford White stands in the same place.”

While White faces the risk of a one-year suspension of his educator license, his biggest concern is other educators not implementing restorative justice out of fear of retaliation.

“My faith is in educators,” he said. “I believe in the administrators. I believe in teachers in the trenches that sometimes have to make very difficult decisions.”

Thursday’s hearing was private, though the outcome is expected to be made public Friday.