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      Saint Ann’s Teacher Charged With Sharing Sexual Images of Students

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      Prosecutors said the teacher, who worked for Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, lured students from four different schools to share explicit images with him via social media.A former teacher at an elite private high school in Brooklyn was charged on Thursday with soliciting sexually explicit images of children, prosecutors said.The teacher, Winston Nguyen, who was arrested in front of students last month, taught math at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights. Between October 2022 and May 2024, Mr. Nguyen pretended at least 11 times to be a teenager and “fellow student” on social media, during which he enticed or tried to entice teenage students to send him “images of nudity and sexual performances,” according to prosecutors at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.Mr. Nguyen, 37, who lives in Harlem, used two different Snapchat accounts to exchange messages with the children — five girls and one boy, all between the ages of 13 and 15 — prosecutors said. The teenagers attended four private schools in Brooklyn: Saint Ann’s, Poly Prep Country Day School, Berkeley Carroll School and Packer Collegiate Institute.Mr. Nguyen was charged with use of a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor, among other charges.Frank Rothman, Mr. Nguyen’s lawyer, said his client turned himself in to prosecutors in Brooklyn on Thursday morning.“We arranged for his surrender with the prosecutors and detectives,” Mr. Rothman said. “He showed up and will be processed like any other defendant.”Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said the investigation into Mr. Nguyen had “revealed extremely disturbing conduct,” adding, “the fact that he was a teacher and a trusted figure among students make these allegations even more troubling.”On one occasion, Mr. Nguyen paid a child to send a sexually explicit video to him, according to prosecutors. He also shared explicit photos he had received with other children, prosecutors said.Before he was hired at Saint Ann’s, Mr. Nguyen was charged with grand larceny after he was accused of stealing more than $300,000 from an older couple he was hired to care for, according to news reports.Mr. Nguyen spent about five months in jail before being sentenced to time served, according to news reports.Saint Ann’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Nguyen is expected to be arraigned Thursday afternoon. More

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      Biden Cancels Speech to Teachers After Union’s Staff Strikes

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      Employees of the National Education Association picketed the site of the group’s annual convention after a walkout over issues including overtime pay.A strike by the staff of the nation’s largest teachers’ union has prompted President Biden to cancel a speech on Sunday in Philadelphia, where he was scheduled to address thousands of delegates to the union’s annual convention.The staff union of the National Education Association began its strike on Friday, citing management’s revocation of holiday overtime pay for the Fourth of July holiday and its refusal to provide information on $50 million in outsourced work that may have previously been done by N.E.A. staff. The strike has shut down the last three days of the four-day convention, as delegates declined to cross a picket line.Mr. Biden’s campaign said he would not do so, either. “President Biden is a fierce supporter of unions and he won’t cross a picket line,” a statement from his campaign said, adding that the president was still planning to travel to Pennsylvania over the weekend.The National Education Association has about 2.5 million members nationwide, not including retirees, according to a recent government filing. The staff union says it represents more than 350 employees assigned to the union’s headquarters in Washington.The staff union, the National Education Association Staff Organization, voted to authorize a strike in April, and its three-year contract expired in late May. It waged a one-day walkout in June. “N.E.A. has abandoned its union values with its actions at the bargaining table,” said the president of the staff union, Robin McLean, in a statement. “N.E.A. would rather cancel a multimillion-dollar convention than comply with labor law.”The N.E.A. said in a statement that it remained “fully committed to a fair bargaining process” and accused the staff union of circulating “misinformation” that “not only misrepresents the facts but also undermines the integrity of our ongoing efforts to honor a fair bargaining process.”The union added that the association offered generous benefits and competitive salaries, saying its current proposal would raise the average salary of staff union members to about $133,000 from about $124,000. The staff union said that salary increases had lagged for years and that most members would see an increase of less than 2 percent per year under the proposal.Strikes by unions’ staff members are not unheard of. Employees of the United Food and Commercial Workers union held a one-day walkout in May. The staff of a large local of the Service Employees International Union in California waged a two-week strike in 2022. More

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      Jill Biden Hosts Teachers at Awards Dinner, With a Bit of Pomp

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      The first lady commended the winner of the National Teacher of the Year award during an event evoking formal state dinners.The hallmarks of a state dinner were there: lavish floral displays festooning the White House, the first lady arriving in a floor-length sequined gown, and members of Congress and cabinet secretaries mingling with attendees. But the honored guest was not the president of France or the prime minister of Japan.It was Missy Testerman of Rogersville City School in rural Tennessee.Jill Biden, the first lady, kicked off a new format for delivering the National Teacher of the Year award on Thursday by hosting this year’s winner, Ms. Testerman, and dozens of other teachers from across the country at the White House with a ceremony emulating the pomp normally reserved for foreign dignitaries.Dr. Biden, who has kept her day job as an English professor while serving as first lady and has worked to support community colleges from the White House, spoke in support of teachers’ unions in her opening remarks and stressed the need of helping educators after the Covid-19 pandemic.“Tonight we celebrate you because teaching isn’t just a job, it’s a calling,” Dr. Biden said, adding, “To answer this call of service is in itself an act of hope.”Ms. Testerman, an English as a second language teacher who had worked as a first and second grade teacher for 30 years, also spoke, discussing the importance of her profession.“As an English as a second language teacher, my students are all either immigrants to our country, or first-generation Americans having been born to immigrant parents,” Ms. Testerman said. “Hearing the experiences of my students and their families reminds me daily what a privilege it is to be an American and what a privilege it is to attend a public school in this country.”The Council of Chief State School Officers, which oversees the award program, has honored finalists and a winner at the White House nearly every year since 1952, according to the council’s website. Dr. Biden has presided over the award ceremony every year of President Biden’s term. (Mr. Biden, who was returning from a trip to North Carolina, dropped in briefly, reflecting on his days teaching law classes and telling the teachers, “You are the kite strings that lift our national ambitions aloft.”)The evolution of the ceremony this year came complete with floral arrangements incorporating irises — the Tennessee state flower — and classroom-themed décor. The guests dined on a menu including lobster ravioli and honey-poached apple mousse, and were entertained by the U.S. Army Chorus with the Army and Air Force Strings.Miguel A. Cardona, the secretary of education, told attendees that the event was meant to bestow “our teachers with a level of national respect that is long overdue.”In all, 57 teachers, including past winners of the award, attended on Thursday, according to a guest list released by the White House. Apart from the honor, selected teachers are also invited into a yearlong professional development program.Before the event, the White House announced new measures aimed at encouraging higher pay for teachers and highlighted changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s effort to slash student debt, which allows public servants such as teachers to have their federal student loan debt forgiven after 10 years.Dr. Biden, a teacher for over 30 years and a member of the National Education Association, has often waded into education policy, particularly during the transition back to in-person learning as the Covid crisis waned. She also led a push to make community colleges tuition free, though legislation she helped draft did not survive in Congress.Mr. Biden renewed the call for free community college as a policy priority in his budget for next fiscal year, but the proposal has little chance of becoming law with Republicans in control of the House. More

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      Before Teacher Was Shot, Assistant Principal Was Warned First Grader Had a Gun

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      A Virginia grand jury found that the administrator had not acted on reports from staff members that the 6-year-old had brought a firearm to Richneck Elementary.The shooting of an elementary teacher by a 6-year-old student in Newport News, Va., last year was preceded by a “shocking” series of lapses by the school’s assistant principal at the time, according to a report by a special grand jury that was released on Wednesday.Despite having been told that same day that the student was “in a violent mood,” and having received several reports that he was carrying a firearm, the assistant principal turned down a school counselor’s request for permission to search the student, the grand jury said in its report.Less than a half-hour later, the student’s teacher, Abigail Zwerner,, was in the classroom with him and 15 other first graders when he pulled out 9-millimeter Taurus handgun and shot her from less than six feet away just before 2 p.m.The bullet passed through her hand and struck her chest. The gun, which was loaded with seven more rounds, jammed after the first shot. The boy later said that he had found it at home, in his mother’s purse.While her students sheltered in a neighboring classroom, Ms. Zwerner stumbled down the hallway and passed out in front of the door to the principal’s office. She survived.“I told you — I tried to keep you safe,” said one of the shooter’s friends, who had told one of Ms. Zwerner’s colleagues at Richneck Elementary School about the gun, according to the report.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teacher Secretly Sold His Students’ Art on Mugs and Shirts, Lawsuit Says

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      Parents of a dozen students at a school near Montreal accused an art teacher in a lawsuit of reproducing portraits from a class assignment and putting them on items that he offered for sale online.In January, students at a junior high school outside Montreal received an assignment to draw a classmate or a self-portrait in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat.“The challenge is to make an original artwork in Basquiat’s style; not to copy one of his images,” the teacher, Mario Perron, wrote to his students on the junior campus at Westwood High School in St.-Lazare, Quebec. “I am very familiar with Basquiat’s work and will return copied work, because it is considered plagiarism.”The assignment was titled “Creepy Portrait.”Basquiat was a worthy subject: He was the influential Brooklyn-born artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent who was known for a brief career in which he innovated with graffiti and other types of improvisational pieces. He died at 27 in 1988.But parents of some students who completed the assignment were shocked to find that Mr. Perron had copied the portraits and was offering mugs, cushions, bags, apparel and other items for sale online bearing reproductions of the artwork, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week in Quebec Superior Court.Joel DeBellefeuille, who learned what was happening from his 13-year-old son, Jax, accused Mr. Perron in an interview of perpetrating a “premeditated” scheme. A portrait of Jax by one of his classmates was among the student artwork being offered for sale, he said. “I freaked out,” Mr. DeBellefeuille said. “I was full of emotions. Still now, it’s really unbelievable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered.

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      When the author received an impassioned email, he dropped everything to visit the students who inspired it.Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx, listening as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”A boy wearing blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some form of disconnection, even trauma,” Michael Almanzar, 19, said. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in some faraway land. That’s literally your next-door neighbor.”The class broke into a round of finger snaps, as if we were at an old-school poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not in an English class at Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenues.Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility — the semicircle of earnest, engaged teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing “There There” (“hope,” “struggle,” “mourning,” “discovery”); the shelf of well-thumbed copies wearing dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.When Orange spoke, students paid close attention. Many identified with the characters in Orange’s book “There There” and with the world it portrayed. Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHis eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that said “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy. When three consecutive students spoke about how they related to Orange’s work because of their own mental health struggles, he was on the verge of tears.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Support for Teaching Gender Identity in School Is Split, Even Among Democrats

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      Americans are deeply divided on whether schools should teach about gender identity, two polls found. But there was broader support for teaching about race.Americans are deeply split over whether gender identity should be taught in school, according to two polls released this week that underscored the extent of the divide on one of the most contested topics in education.Many groups, including Democrats, teachers and teenagers, are split on whether schools should teach about gender identity — a person’s internal sense of their own gender and whether it aligns with their sex assigned at birth, according to a survey by researchers at the University of Southern California and a separate survey by Pew Research Center.But on issues of race, another topic that has fueled state restrictions and book bans, there was broader support for instruction. That extended to some Republicans, the U.S.C. survey found.The results highlight nuances in the opinion over two of the most divisive issues in public education, even as the American public remains deeply polarized along party lines.The U.S.C. survey polled a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 adults, about half of whom lived with at least one school-age child, and broke responses out by partisan affiliation.Democrats were by and large supportive of L.G.B.T.Q.-themed instruction in schools, yet were split when it came to addressing transgender issues for younger students in elementary school.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In School Board Elections, Parental Rights Movement Is Dealt Setbacks

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      Culture battles on gender and race did not seem to move many voters.Conservative activists for parental rights in education were dealt several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.The results suggest limits to what Republicans have hoped would be a potent issue for them leading into the 2024 presidential race — how public schools address gender, sexuality and race.The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said on Wednesday that 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia had won.The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union and a key Democratic power player, said that in 250 races it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates won.On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parental-rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.The modest results for conservatives show that after several years in which the right tried to leverage anger over how schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents like being back to some sense of normalcy,” said Jeanne Allen, chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a right-leaning group in Washington.She suggested Republicans might have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choice, such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic achievement remains depressed.In the suburbs of Philadelphia, an important swing region, Democrats won new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.In the Pennridge School District, Democrats swept five school board seats. The previous Republican majority had asked teachers to consult a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative, Christian institution. The board also restricted access to library books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and banned transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That district had been convulsed by debates over Republican policies restricting books and banning pride flags.The region was a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, when many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divides to resist the influence of teachers’ unions.But that era of education politics is, increasingly, in the rearview mirror.Beyond Pennsylvania, the unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board wins in Iowa, Connecticut and Virginia, as well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting how race is discussed in classrooms.Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that a Republican sweep in the state would allow for progress on that issue.For the parental rights movement, there were some scattered bright spots. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, said she was not deterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives to back away from talking about divisive gender and race issues in education.Progressive ideology on those issues, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said culture battles had distracted from post-pandemic recovery efforts on literacy and mental health.Notably, both the A.F.T. and Moms for Liberty have argued for more effective early reading instruction, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children. More