VERNON, CT - This suburban Hartford town has reached a $100,000 settlement to settle a lawsuit filed regarding an eighth grade class being shown an anti-police video featuring rapper Kendrick Lamar at school.
CT Insider reports that the son of a police officer, who was forced to watch the video, suffered emotional distress and his parents were forced to pay tuition at a private school after the incident.
The settlement was agreed to in a unanimous vote by the Vernon Town Council, with one abstention while the town’s Board of Education also unanimously agreed to finalize the settlement earlier this month.
Neither board discussed the incident prior to their votes.
Vernon’s Town Administrator Michael Purcaro did not elaborate on the votes, saying only that the Town Council, on the advice of counsel, “unanimously approved a settlement that was reached through negotiation.”
The Kendrick video, “Songs that Shook America,” features his song “Alright.” That video depicts police officers as murderers, leading the police officer’s son to experience a number of maladies, including “PTSD, anxiety, depression, shock, confusion, sadness, and social withdrawal, among other psychological injuries,” the lawsuit said, according to Barstool Sports.
According to the opinion piece in Barstool, the teacher in question had been disciplined twice for breaking school guidelines on content shown in class.
The incident in question took place in 2020, and took place at Vernon Center Middle School, and the lawsuit was filed in 2022, the Boston Globe reports. The student is learning disabled and was in a specialized school program, according to the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, “The video depicted police officers as murderers and contained other shockingly violent scenes and controversial statements about police officers.”
Among scenes in the video is one showing someone depicting a police officer firing a gun in Kendrick’s direction. Another scene shows an officer using his fingers like a gun and “firing” it at Kendrick, who falls from the top of a light pole, bleeding.
The lawsuit states that the teacher knew the student’s father was a police officer before showing the video to class. An investigation launched by the Vernon Public Schools showed that an assistant superintendent found the teacher, who was not identified, violated the Vernon Board of Education policy and state professional standards by showing the video, the lawsuit noted.
The student was removed from the teacher’s class by mutual agreement with the requirement the teacher not contact the student.
However, in March of that year, the teacher messaged the student via Google Classroom to “criticize the student’s lack of writing skills and effort on an assignment in a demeaning manner,” the lawsuit reads.
Moreover, the suit alleged that the student experienced “personal embarrassment” because his father was a police officer, and said friends and classmates “disassociated” with him.
A second lawsuit filed by the family over the district’s treatment of the student’s disability was settled as part of the $100,000 deal.
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