According to reports, the teachers gave their two weeks’ notice after conflicts over the curriculum arose at the school. Their effective collective resignation date was to be Feb. 5, but Principal Angelicque Blackmon told the teachers during the school day Jan. 27 that she was accepting their resignations, effective at that moment.
Many reported that the teachers were being fired for teaching Black history, but Ciara Chase, an eighth grade student at (MS)2 and one of the organizers of the protest, said it was not necessarily Black history that landed the teachers in hot water; the sometimes Pan-African lessons, mixed with discussions of the recently deceased Marion Barry and conversations about Kwanzaa principles drew sharp criticism from the school’s administration, Chase said.
As (MS)2, which is under the direction of D.C.’s charter board, and not the direct supervision of Howard University, began to transition with the rest of the country to the Common Core curriculum, Chase said teachers at the school were not receiving adequate training to transition them to the new curriculum.
“They were not teaching the curriculum to [the administration’s] standards,” said Chase. “They just kept teaching the way they had always taught,” because they didn’t know anything else.
The students, already frustrated by high turnover rates and what they perceived to be a lack of availability and accessibility by their principal, organized a protest.
“This wasn’t the first problem we had with the school, but it was the breaking point for us, because those were the teachers that really kept us together,” said Chase.
