The principal at The Madeleine School, a private Catholic school in Northeast Portland, summoned Portland police to the campus in late March when the parents of a Black student demanded to know her plan of action after their fourth grade son reported being referred to with a racist slur on the playground.
Just 72 hours later, the school expelled the boy, effective immediately, saying his parents — Moda Health executive Karis Stoudamire-Phillips and renowned jazz musician Mike Phillips, both prominent Black Portlanders with long histories of volunteering both citywide and in Portland’s tight-knit Catholic school community — had violated the school’s code of conduct for parents.
That one-two punch, coupled with what the family saw as a lack of empathy from the leaders of a community they had poured their hearts into for the last 10 years, prompted them to both hire a lawyer and speak publicly about their story.
“You’re calling the cops on me and kicking out my son because of what he heard?” Mike Phillips asked. “My family is the victim in this. There is no cross you can hide behind.”
The whirlwind of events, charted in detailed emails between the Stoudamire-Phillips family, school leaders and other Madeleine School parents, has caused wrenching upheaval at the PK-8 school, which educates about 250 children.
According to the emails and school community members, several families do not plan to re-enroll next year or have already pulled their children out, including the family of a child who also reported hearing the slur.
According to that child’s father, who did not want to be named to protect his child’s privacy, Principal Tresa Rast told him and his wife that she suspected that their son had made up the entire incident and recommended that the child see a therapist so he could be “deprogrammed” from the anti-racist training he’d received while previously attending public school in Portland.
Around 50 parents have since signed a letter to the parish priest who oversees the school, The Rev. Bonaventure Rummell, asking him to reinstate the Stoudamire-Phillips’ son and transparently overhaul internal policies and practices governing the school’s response to racist incidents.
Their letter stopped short of calling for Rast to resign. But it said she had committed “an act of violence and overt racism” by calling the police, an action they said was “entirely inconsistent with the values of The Madeleine and cannot be tolerated.”
The family of one of the only other Black children at the school wrote a separate letter to Rummell, calling for Rast to resign and outlining what they said were other incidents of racism at the school, including “students being made fun of for their skin tone and hair texture and other slurs. Consistently, there was no schoolwide communication and no policies and procedures actioned.”
The Oregonian/OregonLive contacted Rast, Rummell and Elias Moo, director of Catholic education for the Archdiocese of Portland, with a detailed list of questions about the incident.
Rummell responded that the school was unable to discuss any actions administrators took or the reasons behind them, citing privacy concerns.
But he provided an email that he sent to the schools’ families on April 23 acknowledging that “recent conflicts have impacted our caring Catholic community” and inviting families to reach out to him directly with their concerns.
“The Madeleine School remains committed to building its community based on love, understanding, and respect for the dignity of all people as modeled by Jesus Christ,” Rummell wrote in his email to families. “This specifically includes providing a safe environment for all staff and students that is free from discrimination, harassment, and bullying.”
The conflict played out during what Catholics consider the holiest time of the year, the Lenten season of reflection and repentance leading up to Easter.
Not the first incident for the family
For the Stoudamire-Phillips family, it wasn’t the first time that their family had dealt with a racial incident at the Madeleine School. Their older son, who graduated last year and is now a freshman at a Catholic high school in Portland, had his own fraught experience there, his mother said. And the family had been unsatisfied with how Rast, who became principal in fall 2023, handled it.
As a result, the family considered transferring their younger son this year, Stoudamire-Phillips said. But he had begged to stay and so, she said, she resolved to continue volunteering to help improve the school’s racial equity and social justice policies. She had long done similar work professionally and had insight into practices at other organizations via her seat on the board of directors at De La Salle North Catholic High School, St. Mary’s Academy, the Portland Rose Festival Foundation and the Boise-Eliot Neighborhood Association.
Still, Stoudamire-Phillips said, she had her guard up when she got a call from the school’s secretary on the last Monday in March, reporting that her younger son had heard another student refer to him with the racist slur as they headed back into school after recess. She and her husband rushed to the school to comfort their son and talk to the principal. The conversation got heated, she acknowledged, but for the family, that was natural, given the charged circumstances.
“I told [Rast], you do understand that I don’t have confidence in you, based on my previous experiences with you,” Stoudamire-Phillips recalled. “And she told me, ‘Well, if you don’t trust me, why have [your child] at this school?’”
It was at that point, Stoudamire-Phillips said, that Rast asked her and her husband to leave the office. When they said they would not leave because they still had questions about how the school planned to respond to their son’s experience, Rast called 911, asking for the police to come. The report of the incident from the Portland Police Bureau states that they were called in due to “parents yelling at the employees and refusing to leave.”
“You have to understand that a Black man having the cops called on him is a totally different implication,” Phillips said. “It’s a complete abuse of power, a ‘Look what I have over you.’”
By the time the police arrived, Phillips had excused himself to wait for them outside, wanting to clearly show that he was unarmed and calm with nothing to hide, he said. Rast told police that the matter was under control and that the officers were free to leave.
But the damage was done, Phillips said.
Community objects after student expelled
In the days that followed, the family said they waited for word that the parents of the students involved had been notified and that plans were underway for restorative conversations and disciplinary consequences.
But by Wednesday, Karis Stoudamire-Phillips got a call from the school during which she was told that all involved students had denied using the slur. The implication, she said, was that perhaps her son and his classmate had misheard them.
She responded with a blistering email to Rast and Rummell, defending her son and writing that Rast had fostered a culture in which “both overt and subtle racism are allowed and even encouraged due to there not being real, impactful and behavior changing consequences for racist action…[Rast] is completely inept…It is simply ludicrous to insinuate that one of the only Black boys in the entire Madeleine school would inflict such trauma on himself and lie [about the racist epithet].”
A day later, on April 3, the family received an email from Rummell with a terse subject line: “Termination of partnership.”
“It has become clear that the relationship of trust and confidence that is necessary for a collaborative partnership between parent and school officials for the good of your child no longer exists,” Rummell wrote. “Our partnership is hereby immediately terminated as of the end of the day, April 3. This decision is final and from our perspective this matter is now concluded.”
Their son was allowed to return to campus one more time, Stoudamire-Phillips said, to say goodbye to his teachers.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom,” she said. “Teachers from all over the school were coming in to say bye to him. He knows that he is loved by that community. He just doesn’t understand why these two leaders keep making decisions that have hurt him.”
Five days later, after news of the situation spread through the school community and other parents mobilized to demand explanations, Rummell reached out to the Stoudamire-Phillips family to say that he was “open to dialogue” if they would like to meet. In a follow-up, he wrote that he knew it would be “no consolation” to them, but that he “had been and am personally crushed by this experience.”
For their part, the Stoudamire-Phillips family say they are seeking specific change at The Madeleine, including a public apology, the dismissal of the principal, an independent investigation into the administration’s handling of their son’s complaint, counseling services for their son, mandatory anti-racism training for all administrators, staff, faculty and families and the adoption of clear anti-racist policies to address any future incidents.
They have hired Portland lawyer Bonnie Richardson, though they say they are hopeful that the school will make the changes they’ve outlined and put an independent review panel in place to monitor the response, so they can avoid legal action.
School was focus of gender controversy in 2023
It is the second time in under two years that controversy has spilled into public view from the Madeleine School’s tidy campus. In June 2023, the school lost its longtime principal, who resigned after Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample issued guidance that the region’s Catholic schools should reject students’ decisions to question or change their gender identities and that pronouns, clothing, sports participation and bathroom access should strictly match biological sex.
The Madeleine’s respected former parish priest, the Rev. Mike Biewend, retired that year, and he praised the former principal’s resistance to Sample’s guidelines in a farewell speech at the school’s eighth grade graduation. That section of his speech has since been silenced in a YouTube recording of the ceremony on the Madeleine Parish’s channel.
Amid rising backlash from parents to his new guidelines, Sample temporarily dissolved the archdiocese’s department of Catholic schools, which oversees the 41 diocesan schools, to bring education operations under closer scrutiny by his office. When the office reopened four months later, it had a new focus on evangelical teaching and a new leader in Moo.
The National Catholic Review has since reported that Moo has close ties to the movement for Catholic Liberal Education, a stricter, more classical vision for Catholic schools that centers God and religious teachings across all subjects.
The Stoudamire-Phillips family are not Catholic, but specifically chose the Madeleine for their children because they wanted their education to be guided by Christian values, Mike Phillips said.
Now they are trying to help their son process his expulsion from the cozy Catholic school he’d attended since kindergarten, the one with all his friends, his track teammates, his chess club, his Oregon Battle of the Books team and the teachers who all knew his name.
“I have a little kid that’s wondering, ‘Why doesn’t this school love me?” Stoudamire-Phillips said. “He asked me that to my face with tears in his eyes.”
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Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com
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©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.