The former principal of a Portland Catholic school confirmed that she was officially fired Thursday, after six weeks of intense criticism over her decision to call police to campus during her heated confrontation with two Black parents.

As principal of The Madeleine School, Tresa Rast placed the 911 call on March 31 after the parents demanded to know her plan of action following a playground incident in which the family’s son believed he’d been called a racist slur.

A school investigation was inconclusive about whether the hateful name-calling in fact occurred. But Rast’s interaction with the parents, Karis and Mike Stoudamire-Phillips, longtime pillars of Portland’s Black community, was a potent one.

Within 72 hours of the alleged racist incident, the family was informed by the parish priest who oversees the school that he had decided, after consultation with archdiocesan officials, that their fourth grade son was no longer welcome at the Madeleine.

The 911 call and expulsion made international headlines after The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported on it in late April. Rast was placed on personal leave not long after that and said that lawyers for the Archdiocese presented her last Thursday with the option to resign or to be fired.

In an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Rast, who spoke while seated next to her lawyer John Kaempf, said she and the Rev. Bonaventure Rummell had lobbied to reverse the expulsion and allow the Stoudamire-Phillips’ son to remain at the school. She saw the opportunity for the adults to reconcile, she said.

Contemporaneous records, primarily emails and text messages, support Rast’s account.

In a draft of a letter to the family that Rummell wrote on April 6 and Rast signed off on, Rummell wrote, “It is clear to me that the relationship between you and Tresa is deeply wounded. [But] on behalf of these many people who love you, and speaking with Tresa who agrees, we want to reconcile our relationship considering [your son’s] best interest and yours.”

Elias Moo, the Archdiocese’s Director of Catholic Education, reviewed the draft the same day and expressed some reservations about it, according to an email from him that Rast shared with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

“One of my worries would be about the precedent it sets and [the] message it sends when parents were loud and vocal and put pressure through petitions, etc.,” Moo wrote, after other parents at the school spoke out on behalf of the Stoudamire-Phillips family and 50 of them signed a letter calling for an overhaul of internal policies and practices governing the school’s response to racist incidents.

Moo also wrote that he held “points of strong disagreement with the rhetoric and ideology” in the letter that supported the family.

Ultimately, Moo wrote, the decision of whether or not to seek reconciliation lay with Rummell and Rast.

But a day later, officials at the Archdiocese of Portland dictated otherwise, according to an April 7 text message in which Rummell wrote to Rast, “The powers at the Archdiocese are not favorable of [sic] this course of action.”

In the same text exchange, Rummell wrote that Archdiocesan officials and advisers felt that any attempts at reconciliation should originate with the Stoudamire-Phillips family, not with the church or the school.

Vanessa Gallant, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Portland, declined to comment on the version of events detailed in the emails and text messages, saying only that all questions needed to be referred back to the Madeleine school officials.

In her interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Rast also defended her decision to call 911, saying she did what she felt was necessary in the moment for the safety of other staff and students at the school. She confirmed that neither Karis or Mike Stoudamire-Phillips had threatened her with physical violence or had a weapon.

Rast, who was new to the Madeleine in the fall of 2023, said the Stoudamire-Phillips family had been distressed for months over the school’s handling of a separate incident from the previous year involving their older son, now a freshman at a Catholic high school in Portland.

In Rast’s view, the family wanted to “relitigate” that previous issue when they arrived at the school after the alleged racist slur incident with their younger son in late March, and repeatedly called her “the devil.”

“They were in the front office, right in the doorway to the hallway where kids go back and forth. And I was just behind the counter from them, and I repeatedly asked them to stop yelling,” Rast said. “There was no deescalating the situation. I asked them to leave three times, and they said they weren’t going to leave.”

Karis Stoudamire-Phillips has acknowledged being frustrated and questioning Rast’s leadership, including referring to the school as “the devil that we know” in response to a question about why they had chosen to keep their son enrolled there. She has said her frustration came from a repeated pattern of alleged racist incidents at the school that she felt had not been properly addressed.

After about 20 minutes, Rast said, she called 911. In a recording of the call, which lasted for nearly 11 minutes, Mike and Karis Stoudamire-Phillips can intermittently be heard responding to Rast in the background.

When asked by the dispatcher, Rast said she did not know Karis or Mike Stoudamire-Phillips’ names. She told The Oregonian/OregonLive she denied knowing them because “they were right there and I did not want to further antagonize the situation.”

Rast also told the dispatcher that she wanted to remain on the phone, which she said she did because she felt it would help “deescalate the situation.”

Dan Douthit, a public safety information officer for the city of Portland, said that 911 operators typically try to remain on the line with callers until police have arrived if they are able to. In this case, after about 10 minutes and 45 seconds, the dispatcher notified Rast that she needed to hang up in order to respond to another call.

It is also not out of the ordinary that the police responded to Rast’s call, Douthit said.

“If we receive a report of people yelling at someone and refusing to leave a location, a police call for service is created per policy,” Douthit said.

The Stoudamire-Phillipses also hired a lawyer and sought specific changes at The Madeleine, including Rast’s dismissal.

They also asked for a public apology, 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 adoption of clear anti-racist policies to address any future incidents.

Mike and Karis Stoudamire-Phillips declined to comment further about Rast’s firing and her version of events.

— Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com.