New York School Under Fire for Cartoon Comparing Police to KKK, Slave Owners
Parents outraged after images demonizing police pushed on children
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A high-school teacher at a school in New York is under fire after handing out a Black Lives Matter protest image, which compared law enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan and slave owners.
Westlake High School faced massive backlash from parents for pushing a radical left ideology on young children.
One of the pupil's parents, Ania Paternostro, expressed shock after her daughter showed her the paper.
“My daughter showed me the paper. I said, `What is this?! You’ve got to be kidding me!’ ” Paternostro said.
“This cartoon compares the police to the KKK. It’s an attack on the police.”
“Enough is enough,” Paternostro told The New York Post.
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Paternostro was so angry she went straight to Mount Pleasant School District Superintendent Kurt Kotes and Westlake Principal Keith Schenker, whose school is in the district.
“This cartoon is disturbing. We have to respect the men in blue who protect us,” she said.
“We don’t need a teacher brainwashing my kids. I’ll teach my kids about what’s right and what’s wrong.”
Her daughter Nicole faced bullying for blowing the whistle on the lesson plan.
“The cartoon was disgusting,’’ the teen said about the image, which thought one-sided and anti-police.
“It compared the police with all the terrible people in history," she added.
"It was not fair. It wasn’t right.’’
Westlake HS educator Christoper Moreno reprotley handed out a five-frame cartoon panel to 11th-graders
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The first three frames depict slave owners and a member of the KKK with their knees on the backs of black men in shackles.
The KKK member has a noose around the black man’s neck.
The last two panels show a sheriff and a police officer, each with their knees on the neck of a black man in handcuffs.
The news comes almost a month after a Texas school district teacher compared law enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan in a school assignment.
The teacher handed out an image that was part of an assignment for eighth-graders in the Wylie Independent School District in Collin County, which showed figures kneeling on a black man.
The figures begin with a slave trader, then a slave owner, then a Klansman. Following that came two figures representing police officers, with one sign saying "whites only.”
The black man is shown saying: “I can’t breathe,” the infamous last words of George Floyd before he died in police custody earlier this year.
The school issued an apology after admitting the assignment was not part of its curriculum.
“We are sorry for any hurt that may have been caused through a social studies lesson that included political cartoons that reflected negatively on law enforcement," the school district said.
