Teacher Jeena Lee-Walker has filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Education and several of her (former) school administrators for contract violations and infringements of her First Amendment rights.
Lee-Walker alleges that officials at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry retaliated against her after she challenged them about her lesson on the “Central Park Five.”
That quintet of (black and Latino) teenagers were wrongly convicted of attacking and raping a (white) female jogger in New York City’s Central Park in 1989.
Black students “in particular” would get “riled up” by the lessons, Lee-Walker alleges administrators told her.
The New York Daily News reports:
[Administrators] told her the lessons could create little “riots,” according to court papers.
“I was stunned,” she told the Daily News. “I was kind of like, the facts are the facts. This is what happened. These boys went to jail and lost 14, 18 years of their lives. How can you say that in a more balanced way?”
Although Lee-Walker, 37, agreed to soften her approach, she argued “that students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up.”
“I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over,” she said. “I thought that this material was not only engaging but important.”
But after several tense exchanges with supervisors, Lee-Walker received a series of bad performance reviews over the next 18 months that ultimately led to her dismissal, the suit said.
Lee-Walker said she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations not just because of the material, but because she pushed back.
Lee-Walker was fired in May. She had taught at the HSAII for two years, and a total of six in New York’s public schools.
h/t to Frank LoMonte.
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