The morning after a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Principal Blain Watson was stressing.
“I was up all night thinking about the responsibility,” said the principal of academics at Alain LeRoy Locke College Preparatory Academy in Watts.
After the Jan. 6 insurrection, which disrupted Congress’s official electoral tally in favor of Joe Biden, educators around California had to decide how to address the attack with students. Some only touched lightly on the subject, others had full lessons prepared the following day, and many opted to avoid the subject altogether.
Watson went all in.
“A lot of us make the mistake of just saying, ‘All right, kids, this is what happened. Let's hear your thoughts,’ ” he said. “But we have to really be responsible about the messaging around race.”
Between COVID-19 and the examination of systemic racism after the killing of George Floyd, Watson knew his mostly Black and Latino students were already raw. Now, rioters, some with white supremacist ties, had carried the Confederate flag into the Capitol in the name of overturning a fair election, something they hoped to accomplish by a rejection of election results, based largely on fictional conspiracy theories about fraud in cities with large Black populations.
So if teachers were going to support their students, they’d need support, too.
“Educators need to be prepared for the range of emotions kids may be feeling — from sadness to rage,” Watson said.
Beyond helping students explore their emotions, he wanted to empower them to channel those feelings into designing a schoolwide response.
For 17-year-old Marveon Mabon, the student body president, the invitation was welcome; he’d been hungry to create a space for students to bring their full selves to the classroom.
“I feel like the schools expect us to just drop the hardship, drop the losses, drop the traumatic experience that we go through and just focus on school,” Mabon said.
Student Vice President Angelica Barrera, 17, jumped at the chance, too.
“I don't want to be old and know that when I saw events happening, I did nothing about it,” she said. “My main goal for this is to get students ready, to teach them how to respond when we see things like this happen, instead of ignoring it or letting it defeat us.”
