Controversy 101: City Teachers Tackle the Garner Case

At East Side Community School in Manhattan's East Village, students received a personal letter from Principal Mark Federman on Thursday. It said he was "despondent over a severe lack of justice" for the second time in two weeks. Federman was referring to a Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict a white police officer in the death of Eric Garner, coming on the heels of another grand jury's refusal to indict a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager.

"This is not about being anti-police, it is about being pro justice and pro 100% respect," Federman told his students, as he urged them to learn as much as they can and discuss what's happening.

The teachers at the combined middle and high school appear to have taken that lesson to heart. They made stickers saying "Black Lives Matter" and "Justice for Eric Garner." Some showed the mayor's press conference, and the video of Garner in what appeared to be a police chokehold, to older students.

"It was really emotional," said English teacher Nicole Dixon, who teaches seventh grade. Although most students knew about the case, she said some had never heard of it. "We gave them some time to just sort of talk about their reactions to it."

Now, she said, some now want to plan their own peaceful protests.

Tenth grade global studies teacher Yolanda Betances said students with family members in the police department "feel like police officers get a bad rap," while others described their own negative interactions with officers.

The Garner case didn’t come up in every school. One disappointed teacher, who works at a school for children with special needs and declined to be identified, said she mentioned the topic, “and people just grimaced as if it were bad weather.”

But plenty of schools did tackle it. At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, journalism teacher Ann Neary said her students compared the Garner case with the one in Ferguson. They also got into a real debate about whether anyone has the right to kill another person.

"The word 'right' was the word that triggered an argument," she said, because it raised many questions. "Are you saying legal right or moral right, or are you saying you just have an ethical right?"

She said conversations like this are necessary, "because we need them to know that we care about how they are viewing the world, and we need them to know they have a place in the world."

At the private Manhattan Country School, sixth grade teacher Karen Zaidberg introduced the Garner case to make a lesson about the Jim Crow era of segregation more relevant.

"We talked about what it means to be treated differently just based on the fact that we live in a world in which there's always an assumption that if you are a brown or black skinned male, that there's always a sort of additional burden," she explained.

But some students needed more help having those conversations. At the International High School at Union Square, interning social worker David George said he was surprised to hear kids laughing in the hallway Thursday as one boy made a joke with the words "I can't breathe," Garner's last spoken words.

"I gave him the benefit of the doubt in saying, 'I'm sure that you don't realize what you're saying is offensive, but in reality it's extremely offensive,'" he said.

The school's students all hail from different countries and George said faculty members were meeting about how to talk with the kids about the case, and where it fits into race relations in the United States.