New Jersey Teacher Suspended After ‘Biased’ Comments About George Floyd Death During Class

A high school teacher in New Jersey has been suspended with pay after sharing “very biased” comments about George Floyd’s death with his students.

Dickinson High School science teacher Howard Zlotkin was supposed to be discussing climate change during a landscape and design class on Zoom with his students. However, he began talking about Black Lives Matter and the death of Floyd, a Black man from Minneapolis who was killed by a police officer.

A video of Zlotkin’s rant, which was shared by WNBC-TV, shows Zlotkin referring to Floyd as a “criminal” who “got arrested” and “killed because he wouldn’t comply.”

During the clip, Zlotkin also states people are “whining and crying about Black Lives Matter,” and he appears to be against the idea of Floyd being treated like a “hero.”

The following day in a different video, Zlotkin became upset with four black female students who challenged his ideas and assigned them to write an essay on “why Black lives should matter.”

A parent then reached out to school officials on the matter. Franklin Walker, the superintendent of Jersey City Public Schools, revealed an investigation has been launched over the incident, and the police have been contacted because Zlotkin’s actions could be considered a hate crime.

“The comments that were made were very biased, and he shouldn’t be having that kind of discussion with the children — that had nothing to do with the subject matter in the classroom,” Walker said in a statement.

“The position that he put the children in certainly was a very uncomfortable one by doing and saying those kinds of things.”

Following the incident, the high school has offered students counseling to discuss the way Zlotkin’s rant affected them. “We know it affected them some type of way,” Walker explained.

“If this is the way this [teacher] feels, then it means that there are other things that certainly may have gone on, things that were said to address what his personal feelings are, which have no place in the classroom with our children.”

Along with being suspended from Dickinson High School, which Zlotkin has taught at for 20 years, he was also suspended from his position as an adjunct professor at Hudson County Community College.