New York City Teacher Fired For Teaching Her Students About The Central Park Five

Lee-Walker said she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations not just because of the material, but because she pushed back.

She was fired in May, roughly two years after joining the High School for the Arts and six years after she began teaching in city public schools.

“I felt abandoned and mistreated,” Lee-Walker said of the ordeal. “I think a lot of teachers in the system feel the same way.”

Lee-Walker said retaliation against her violated her First Amendment right to discuss the Central Park Five case, and that the firing violated the city’s contract with the teacher’s union because she was not given a required 60 days notice.

She filed suit in Manhattan Federal Court, and named the Department of Education and several school administrators as defendants.

Lee-Walker, who graduated from Barnard and has post-grad degrees from Harvard and Fordham, did not specify damages in her suit.

The city law department declined to comment on the litigation.

“Ms. Lee-Walker is the type of teacher we want in a classroom,” her lawyer, Ambrose Wotorson, told The New York Daily News.

“We’re not looking to turn our students into automatons. We’re looking to turn out independent thinkers — and she got fired for that, and that’s just wrong,” Wotorson said.