The Paterson teacher who ignited a firestorm by calling her first-grade students “future criminals” in a Facebook post defended herself Wednesday in a Newark hearing on whether she should lose her job.
Jennifer O’Brien told an administrative law judge that she wrote the post in exasperation because six or seven unruly students kept disrupting her lessons, distracting children who wanted to learn.
One boy had recently hit her, another had struck another child, and she had given the principal several disciplinary reports on students during her three months in charge of a class of 23. She said they also stole a box of stickers she hid in a closet to use as prizes.
“I was speaking out of frustration to their behavior, just that build up of ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ and I’m actually scared for their futures, for some of them,” O’Brien said. “If you’re hitting your teacher at 6 or 7 years old, that’s not a good path.”
O’Brien, of Elmwood Park, posted her Facebook remark to 333 friends on March 28. Immediately it was forwarded outside her circle. It ripped through the district and within days brought an onslaught of national media attention, with network news trucks camped outside School 21. Critics called her comment racist and painful for a community already ravaged by violence, drugs and low expectations for its young; others sympathized with an overwhelmed teacher who made a dumb mistake in writing that was amplified by the lightning speed of the Internet.
The post, written after she got home from work, read “i’m not a teacher – i’m a warden for future criminals.”
It was followed by a second post six hours later saying “they had a scared straight program in school – why couldn’t i bring 1st graders?” Earlier that day, O’Brien had watched sixth-graders talk to prison inmates through a program aimed at showing teenagers up-close the harsh consequences of crime.
In her first public comments on the incident, O’Brien told Judge Ellen Bass that she was surprised her posts were so misinterpreted. She said she deleted them as soon as she realized they were causing offense and immediately apologized to her principal. She said some parents also had trouble handling the kids in her class.
“I had quite a few parents that came to me saying ‘I don’t know what to do with them at home … give me some strategies,’” she said.
After the uproar, the Paterson school district suspended O’Brien without pay and filed charges to revoke her tenure for unprofessional conduct. District officials said they hoped to wrap up the case quickly; by law, she goes back on the payroll Sept. 4, after 120 days of suspension. O’Brien joined the district in 1998 and makes $60,513.
After taking briefs from both sides on Oct. 10, the judge has 45 days to make recommendations to the education commissioner, who can accept, reject or modify them.
O’Brien’s testimony followed two days of hearings that gave a window into a beleaguered district as school officials tried to calm furious parents and local pastors sought to defuse tensions in their congregations. Two days after the posting, a small group of parents and activists protested outside the school.
The district called as a witness the Rev. Kenneth Clayton, president of the Paterson branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people. According to the hearing transcript, he said at first he thought the post was a “sick joke.”
“I couldn’t believe anybody would be that stupid to post something like that on Facebook,” he said. Then he started getting calls from a “vast” number of people in the city. “I think people were just overwhelmed with a sense of anger which we were just trying to make sure that we were able to calm … because we didn’t want it to turn into some type of angry demonstration.”
Clayton said the comment “helps us realize again that racism has not been erased from our country … I know that children can be testy and tedious and all those things, but to say in first grade there that you’re a warden for them, that’s reprehensible … if a teacher or any adult leader could look at children like that in the first grade and think that, then the children are doomed.”
O’Brien’s lawyer, Nancy Oxfeld, said in an interview the post was a mistake but not racist. “If you make a comment that is not a racist comment but you’re a white person and it’s made about students who happen to be black and Hispanic, there’s a presumption that it’s racist,” Oxfeld said. She noted in court there was no record that any parent complained about O’Brien before the incident or that she spoke inappropriately to students.
Principal Frank Puglise testified on a previous day that he saw no evidence in school that O’Brien had a low opinion of her first graders, but that she did need help with classroom management so he sent a coach to assist her.
School 21, with about 700 children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade, sits in one of Paterson’s most troubled areas. About half the students are black, half Hispanic, and 80 percent qualify for free lunch. Capt. James Smith, executive director of security for Paterson schools, testified that in the neighborhood, police got 9,000 calls for service in the past school year, including 41 for fights with weapons, 29 for robberies, and hundreds for gang activity, drugs and other “quality-of-life issues.”
Robert Murray, lawyer for the Paterson schools, said the teacher’s comment was especially damaging there. “To say that all the children who are 6 years old are future criminals is more painful in School 21 because of this environment,” he said. “A child in School 21 knows the sound in the night is a gunshot, not a sound on the television set like a suburban child.”
Oxfeld argued the number of crimes in the area was irrelevant, but the judge said context was important. “I do understand,” the judge said, “that it stings more” to be called a criminal “when a child lives in a neighborhood where what they hear at night is a gunshot.”
Paterson schools superintendent Donnie W. Evans
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