CT town OKs $100,000 payment after school screening of anti-police rap video

With no discussion, Vernon’s school board has signed off on a lawsuit settlement that pays $100,000 to the son of a retired Manchester police officer who sued because an eighth-grade teacher required the boy and his class to watch an anti-police rap video.The case created national headlines and set off debates on Facebook, Reddit and even the comments section of YouTube, but the settlement went through without a word.Nobody on the town council offered any comments before unanimously endorsing the agreement last week, and the school board made no mention of it before taking a perfunctory approval vote Monday night.The agreement has a confidentiality clause, and Superintendent Joseph Macary said Wednesday that he could say only that “The Vernon schools always do what’s good for the students.”Vernon officials were not talking, either, instead issuing a one-line statement saying only that “The Vernon Town Council, on the advice of counsel, unanimously approved a settlement that was reached through negotiation.”The matter stems from February, 2020, when a Vernon Center Middle School teacher screened an episode of “Songs that Shook America,” a series of videos about controversial music. The episode focused on Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 rap video “Alright.”The plaintiff, a student in the eighth-grade social studies class, watched the video and had a profoundly bad reaction, the suit claimed. The boy had a diagnosed learning disorder and was troubled because the video “depicted police officers as murderers and contained shockingly violent scenes and controversial statements about police officers,” according to the suit.The boy’s parents said he went through anxiety, depression, emotional distress and social withdrawal because of the video, and “suffered from personal embarrassment including … the stigma associated with being the son of a police officer, which has caused friends and others to disassociate with him.”Two years after the incident, Manchester attorney Ryan Barry filed suit on the boy’s behalf against the town, the school system and the teachers seeking compensation including the cost of treatment and counseling. The suit said the teacher had twice before been reprimanded for showing inappropriate videos to his classes, and also said he should have known the Kendrick Lamar video would cause the boy emotional or psychological distress.The lyrics include “And we hate po-po, Wanna kill us dead in the street for sure.”The suit contends the teacher violated school policy on showing videos to students, and hadn’t gotten administrators’ approval in advance for the Kendrick Lamar screening.The suit also claimed that after the boy’s parents first complained to school administrators, there was an agreement that the teacher would be barred from having any contact with the boy. But a month later, the teacher connected with the boy through Google Classroom and criticized his writing skills “in a demeaning matter,” the suit claims.In court documents, the town said the boys’ parents were trying to link the screening “with the need to attend a private, out-of-state boarding school at an annual cost of $40,000 among other claimed damages.”Vernon’s school board approved a $100,000 lawsuit settlement on Monday night.In a response to the suit, school attorneys Thomas Gerarde and Kristan Jakiela specifically denied the claim that the teacher had accepted a no-contact agreement and later violated it.Emphasizing that he wasn’t referring to the case, Macary told The Courant on Wednesday that Vernon schools have “a pretty tight curriculum” spelling out what teachers can and can’t teach. There are also school board policies that prohibit screening some movies without prior parental permission. 

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