February 2, 2015
Current Events
Parents and students at the Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science (MS)² in Washington, D.C. are outraged after Principal Angelicque Blackmon fired 3 teachers in front of their students, moving some students to tears as they watched their favorite teachers escorted off campus by the police. The instructors given the boot were 3 social studies teachers who implemented African-American history into their curriculum.
“The school administration does not want the social studies teachers to teach African-American history,” said parent Shannon Settle. “We are on the campus of an HBCU [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]. We need to know our culture; the school is 90-percent African American.”
“While students are still present in the classroom? How unprofessional,” said parent Delrica Battle. “These children are crying. They said they couldn’t say goodbye. The teachers are upset, the students are upset.”
The teachers were all escorted out by police officers “because they were trying to teach us things about our African heritage,” said 7th-grade student Kameron Gains-Gillens.
Principal Blackmon, who is new to the school, has been called “abrasive” and “out of touch with her own heritage” after saying she didn’t want children learning the origins of Kwanzaa or about prolific African-Americans.
Blackmon has refused to address the allegations, but she did meet with parents late last week. Perhaps this principal needs to return to school and be re-instructed on the importance of George Washington Carver, W. E. B. Du Boise, Madam CJ Walker and others.
TAKE OUR POLL:
(function(){var voice = document.createElement(‘script’);voice.type = ‘text/javascript’;voice.src = ‘https://voicepolls.com/widget/p.js’;var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(voice, s);})();
Looks like somebody's out of touch with their own blackness. This makes no kind of sense.