Mohammed, a middle school student in Philadelphia, puts on his “Free Gaza” bracelet as routinely as he brushes his teeth. He often wears a keffiyeh around his shoulders, despite, he said, being told at school to take it off.
“He’s so sure about who he is and what he wants to represent, he doesn’t care,” said Mariam, his mother.
Like many young Palestinian students across the country, Mohammed, who like his mother asked to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisals, has grown more political over the last year. His grandmother lives in the West Bank, and two of his cousins were killed by the Israeli military, part of the civilian death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In November 2023, Mohammed’s English teacher at Philadelphia’s Baldi Middle School, Caroline Yang, and two other seventh grade teachers, Emily Antrilli and Jordan Kardasz, sensed Mohammed and other Muslim and Palestinian students needed a safe place to express themselves. Yang opened her classroom after school. The war was around a month old, and emotions were running high on all sides.
“They don’t want us to be loud. They don’t want us to be anything.”
The students decided to make posters. One listed names of Palestinian children killed by Israeli soldiers. Another showed a dove between Israeli and Palestinian flags. Some of the posters were adorned with slogans like “End apartheid,” “This is not war, this is genocide,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Some of the posters contained red handprints; other handprints showed the red, white, green, and black of the Palestinian flag.
The teachers put up the signs, along with a Palestinian flag, in the school’s commons on November 17, 2023. The new display would accompany the flags of over 30 other nations, including Israel’s. Within an hour, before classes began, the school removed them, according to the teachers and a principal’s report obtained by The Intercept.
Soon, the posters would become the flashpoint in allegations and recriminations that included accusations of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim bias, as well as antisemitism. By the time the dust settled with the end of the school year last summer, the fallout had hit students and teachers alike. Some parents decided to pull students from the school. The three teachers had all left their jobs — and decided to file a federal civil rights complaint.
“Silencing. Erasure,” said Mariam, Mohammed’s mother, who was considering pulling both children from Baldi but ultimately kept them enrolled. “They don’t want us to be loud. They don’t want us to be anything.”
Photos: Philadelphia School District
Strife in Schools
Across the country, students and educators who have advocated for Palestinians have faced censorship and professional repercussions. The Council on American Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, is suing a Maryland school district for allegedly placing three teachers on administrative leave for supporting Palestinian rights. Last October, two Minnesota public high school students were suspended for chanting “from the river to the sea.”
In Philadelphia schools, Israel’s war on Gaza had already sparked a furor. Protests erupted after a student podcast was censored by the district, and ad hoc groups have formed to make demands about Palestinian rights from the school system. The district has since suspended the teacher who assigned the censored project and who faced allegations of bias against supporters of Israel. District parents have since petitioned for her reinstatement and questioned the district’s motives.
As for Yang, Antrilli, and Kardasz, the teachers at Baldi, school district communications officer Christina Clark said Philadelphia schools seek to create inclusive learning environments in the full knowledge that their actions will shape students’ lives, but would not comment on personnel matters. Baldi’s principal, Bianca Gillis, did not respond to The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment. In a report summarizing multiple disciplinary hearings, Gillis wrote that the posters and flag caused staff pain and “had a negative and profound impact on Israeli and non Israeli staff.”
“I would not be able to sit right with myself if, as a teacher, I didn’t do anything while a genocide is happening.”
“We encourage all of us, staff, community members, and stakeholders of all kinds, to be the role models they deserve,” Clark wrote in a statement to The Intercept. She said the district has held two student forums to allow dialogue between the communities involved. The district has also partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education for workshops with district and school leaders “to increase understanding of antisemitism and Islamophobia.”
For the teachers, however, facilitating the posters was more than just a nod to inclusivity.
“With that many Palestinian students in our school,” Yang said, “I would not be able to sit right with myself if, as a teacher, I didn’t do anything while a genocide is happening.”
The Backlash
A month after the posters and flag were put up and taken down, the principal recommended that the district suspend the teachers without pay for five days and transfer them to different schools. The subsequent investigation, concluded in April, confirmed the disciplinary measures, though by the time the process was over, the recommendation for Kardasz’s transfer had been rescinded.
In May, with a month left in the school year, district officials ordered the teachers to stop teaching and work from home. Before the suspensions could be imposed, all three teachers resigned. They all believed that they could not effectively teach given the circumstances. The teachers defied orders and hung the posters and flag, which led to concerns among other faculty members about safety and discrimination within the school. Tears were shed over fears of continued Antisemitism, as reported in internal disciplinary reports. The teachers felt that there was a double standard in how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was handled in the school, citing examples of favoritism towards certain causes. Despite the controversy, the teachers believed in supporting a free Palestine and standing against violence towards Palestinian people. One student involved in making the posters expressed a sense of pride and solidarity, contrasting the support they felt in the classroom with the school’s actions. The mother of another student who participated in the posters chose to remove her kids from the school and place them in a private school due to the situation. Some of the teachers, like Antrilli and Kardasz, have moved on to teach elsewhere, while Yang is unsure if she will return to teaching. The impact of the incident on the students and teachers is evident, with Mohammed questioning if he will ever see Ms. Yang again. Can you please rewrite this sentence?
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