One girl’s mother refused to allow her to cut holes for her eyes, so she wrapped the sheet around her face. Though the entire class originally agreed to take part, only five of the students brought sheets to school April 1. To parody it was the most they could do.” “During our discussions, they wanted to know what they could do to get rid of the Ku Klux Klan. “They wanted to mock something they felt was very despicable,” the teacher recalled. One black youngster broached the idea of dressing up like the Klan as a way of lampooning the white-cloaked group, Beckett said. With April Fool’s Day approaching, the students in the class began talking about concocting some sort of gag. During a discussion and a writing assignment, they expressed blanket outrage that such a racist organization exists, Beckett said. To help spark discussion, the teacher recently showed her pupils a videocassette of the award-winning film “Places in the Heart,” which features a sequence involving a KKK attack on a black character.įor many of the students, it was their first exposure to the Klan. She began teaching in Oceanside in 1984 as a substitute but was soon offered a full-time job teaching English communications to students reading below grade level, as well as art and photography.Īs part of the curriculum for her communications class this year, Beckett and her students took on the topic of prejudice. But my main concern is to not have anything disruptive to the school.”Ī widow, Beckett has been a teacher for more than two decades, instructing students in public schools, the private sector and at a university in Brazil. “Public humiliation is not something any of us enjoy. “It has not been a good April,” Beckett said during a recent interview at the junior high school. She has even stopped writing checks at the grocery store, for fear that her identity will be revealed. She has received questioning phone calls from parents. She has agonized over the incident, apologizing to her students, the school staff, district administrators, the NAACP.
We think you’re a big farce.’ ”īeckett, meanwhile, has been publicly humiliated. They can say to the Klan ‘We’re not afraid of you. Maybe we could learn something from the kids. They can take the Ku Klux Klan and treat it as a joke. “Still, I can’t help but think that perhaps these students are a lot smarter than us adults. “Certainly, she shouldn’t have allowed that kind of thing to happen,” said Bibs Orr, a longtime school board member.
Though Walker gave the teacher a verbal reprimand for the incident, he and other district officials have stood solidly behind Beckett as opposition has mounted, saying the episode has been blown out of proportion by the media and members of the public unfamiliar with the facts of the matter.
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