Brooke Harris

By Josh Katzenstein, The Detroit News

 A Pontiac, Michigan charter school teacher said she lost her job because of a fundraising idea to honor Trayvon Martin, the teen shot in Florida.

The firing has generated national attention. The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center demanded Monday that Brooke Harris be reinstated and a petition at change.org had nearly 5,000 signatures overnight.

The middle school English and journalism teacher at Pontiac Academy for Excellence claims she was fired March 29 after a disagreement with the school’s superintendent over the fundraiser proposed by students for Martin, the African-American teen killed by a neighborhood watchman.

Harris, a third-year teacher at the school, said she is confused about why she lost her job. “Whenever I discipline a kid in my classroom, I make sure they know what they did wrong,” Harris said Monday night. “I was just kind of in a state of shock.”

Superintendent Jacqueline Cassell said she couldn’t discuss Harris’ firing but said she wants students’ focus now to be on learning, not activism.

Cassell said workplaces have rules, and “when rules are violated, there are consequences.” “I’m a child of the civil rights movement,” the superintendent said. She said she has supported the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the past but said “this is not the time in the school year” for efforts that distract from academics.

Harris said the idea for a fundraiser resulted from showing her eighth-grade journalism and yearbook class coverage of the slaying, and then asking them to write a short opinion piece on the case.

“A lot of them were very affected by it. A lot of them took it personally,” Harris said, adding the K-12 school has an enrollment of about 1,400 students, with the majority black. “A couple of them also wanted to do something more.”

Once a month, the school allows students to pay $1 to wear street clothes instead of their uniform, so students proposed that March 28 — the final class day before spring break — could be a day all students pay $1 to wear a hoodie, which is what Martin, 17, was wearing when he was killed.

Harris said the principal approved the idea, but Cassell did not. The superintendent asked to meet with Harris and gave her a two-day suspension. “It was during that meeting that I was told I was a bad teacher,” Harris said. “Harris met with Cassell again and was given a two-week suspension.

“I asked her if she could please tell me what I did wrong to come to the first meeting,” Harris said. “After I asked that question twice, she never gave me an answer — then she fired me.”