Texas Governor Greg Abbott is calling for a middle school teacher to be dismissed after they assigned homework that compared KKK members to police officers.
On Twitter Sunday, the Republican governor said that the unnamed eighth-grade teacher “should be fired,” and called for the Texas Education Agency to conduct an investigation.
“A teacher in a Texas public school comparing police officers to the KKK is beyond unacceptable,” Abbott wrote. “It’s the opposite of what must be taught.”
The assignment was given to 400 eighth-grade students, FOX 4-KDFW reported, and contained a cartoon that showed eight images of men, including KKK members and police officers, with their knees on a Black man’s neck as he says “I can’t breathe.”
The news first came to light when the National Fraternal Order of Police Vice President Joe Gamaldi shared a photo of the cartoon and described it as a homework assignment “comparing police officers to slave owners and the KKK.”
“This is abhorrent and disgusting, and only further widens the gap between police officers and the youth in our community,” Gamaldi wrote last week. He also shared a letter he sent to the school superintendent, which said: “What is even more disturbing is that no adult within your school thought better before sending this assignment to children.”
According to Gamaldi, the school district “pulled back the assignment, apologized for the assignment, and will be issuing an apology to the parents.”
The school district said in a statement to FOX 4, “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. Wylie ISD values our school resource officers and all members of the law enforcement community.”
