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Elijah Johnson, now 21, speaks at a youth summit at Milwaukee's City Hall in 2017. The summit was part of his ethnic studies class, which included programming on Black Lives Matter, a course he called the most powerful of his educational care.(Photo: Submitted photo)

In her Tuesday Zoom class, Milwaukee teacher Angela Harris set aside the lesson she'd planned to help her first graders process the protests and unrest that had erupted in their neighborhoods and across their city in recent days.

They had so many questions. They asked about George Floyd, the black man whose killing by a Minnesota police officer sparked the protests a familiar story for children who already know the names of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. They asked ifshe could hear the shouting,the sirens and the helicopters,the bangs that sounded like gunfire.

Harris answered them all. But first, she shareda video she'd taken of them reciting their scholar's declaration, from the days beforea global pandemic sent them home. In it, they see themselves, all black and brown children, chanting:

I will not die young.

I matter.

I'm worth it.

My future has a purpose.

"I told them, 'I want you to remember the things we say about our lives in our morning meeting, and how that's importantto what isgoing on in our community," said Harris, who teaches at Milwaukee's Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary Schooland sits on the national steering committee for Black Lives Matter at Schools Week.

"We talk about how black lives matter in our classroom from the first day of school to the last," she said. "At the very least, I want to show them they matter in a society that makes them feel like they don't."

School districts across the country, most of them large urban districts,have worked in recent years to develop and implement Black Lives Matter programming in their schools, courses that explore the histories and present day experiences of black Americans through a social justice lens.

Milwaukee Public Schools, with almost 75,000 students, mostly low-income students of color, has struggled to create a comprehensive curriculum and scale it district-wide. But it's hoping to restart those efforts next year.

Last week, just hours before demonstrators spilled onto Milwaukee streets to protest the killing of George Floyd, school board members voted to add five new ethnic studies teachers and fund the development of a curriculum that would include programming around Black Lives Matter.

"The nation is crying out," said District 3 board member Sequanna Taylor, a former MPS teacher's aide who put forth the budget amendment to fund the additions.

"It would include the study of all types of ethnicities. ... But it has to include Black Lives Matter," she said. "It's 2020, and we're in the same place we were 50 and 60 years ago."

The Black Lives Matter atSchoolsmovement is a national coalition of educators thatgrew out of the protests following the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida the year before.

Itoffers free resources and lessons for teachers who want to incorporate tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement into their lesson plans. And it promotes a number of demands, including the hiring of more black teachers, mandating black history and ethnic studies courses, ending zero-tolerance disciplinary policies and investment in school counselors rather than policing.

"It's about centering the black experience in the classroom, and acknowledging the struggles and contributions black people made to this country and the world," said Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and co-author of "Teaching for Black Lives,"published by Milwaukee-based Rethinking Schools in 2018.

"For too long, the corporate mainstream curriculum has reduced the black experience to slavery," he said.

Philadelphia high school teacher Nick Bernardini, who sits on the social justice committee that launched the first Black Lives Matter week in education, called it "bottom-up history."

"We focus on the actors in the historical context that don'tget agency in the traditional text," he said. "The goal is to really connect the past to the present ... to show how the struggles of the past are connected to the struggles of today, and that the Civil Rights Movement never ends.

"And it has to include teaching on anti-racism. In order to combat racism, you have to be anti-racist. It's not enough to just be neutral."

MPS adopted a Black Lives Matter resolution in 2015thatincluded the creation of a curriculum, though it never really got off the ground.

Many MPS teachers have embraced Black Lives Matter and incorporate its tenets into their lessons. And the district has offered professional development in culturally responsive teaching practices. But there's no comprehensive district-wide programming.

MPS has struggled to hire and keep ethnic studies teachers, and seven of the eight current positions have gone unfilled. Its lone ethnic studiesteacher LucasWierer at Obama School of Career and Technical Education includes a unit on Black Lives Matter in his class, which draws a diverse group of students via teleconference from Obama and Washington high schools and Milwaukee School of Languages.

A few weeks into the class last year, Wierertook his students to the Sherman Phoenix, a popular gathering place that rose, literally, from the ashes of the unrest that erupted in Sherman Park Neighborhood in the summer of 2016.

It was really just an ice-breaker, to give the kids a chance to meet and hang out.

But they would talk in the weeks before and after about the genesis of the Phoenix and the context in which it emerged.

They talked about Sylville Smith, the black man whose fatal shooting by a Milwaukee police officer sparked the unrest that many, including Wierer, call the "uprising." They talked about racism, disinvestment and police brutality;thepower of political action and civil disobedience; the difficult community conversations that followed and how the Phoenix grew out of those.

"It's really about tackling the some of the most serious issues that exist in society today," said Wierer.

Elijah Johnson, a 2017 MPS graduate who took a similar class when it was offered at the James Madison Academic Campus, called it "the most phenomenal experience" of his academic career. It culminated with his sharing what he learned at a student summit at Milwaukee's city hall.

"That class helped me to evolve," said Johnson, 21, who now works at Silver Spring Neighborhood House and took part in peaceful protests this week in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Appleton.

"I became more of a people person, more of a leader, more mature.And I definitely feel like I'm making a difference," he said.

The 12 ethnic studies positions in next year's budget if the district can find and hire the teachers to fill them would allow MPS to expand the courses to every high school and one middle school. The idea is for them to develop a curriculum, parts of which could then be shared with teachers across the district.

And that can be difficult, too, said Wierer, in a district like Milwaukee where the majority of teachers, including him, are white.

White teachers, he said, may be interested and comfortable with the content but struggle to connect with the students. Others may struggle with content around white privilege and bias and find it difficult to accept that their longstanding methods of teaching may not be pedagogically sound.

But getting the curriculum into the younger grades is crucial, said Wierer and Harris.

"Most racial ideas are formed between the ages of 2 and 12," said Wierer. "By the time I get them in ethnic studies, they're pretty much firmly in place."

Contact Annysa Johnson at anjohnson@jrn.com or 414-224-2061. Follow her on Twitter at @JSEdbeat. And join the Journal Sentinel conversation about education issues at http://www.facebook.com/groups/WisconsinEducation.

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As unrest grips the nation, MPS hopes to bolster its ethnic studies and Black Lives Matter programming - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel