Chicago City Wire

A suspended Chicago teacher, who is white, has filed a nine-count complaint in federal court against the Board of Education and four of his former colleagues, all Black, alleging battery and race discrimination surrounding an incident where a Bears football doll was found hanging in his classroom at the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School.

The complaint is a follow up to one filed in Cook County Circuit Court in January 2023 over the March 2022 incident.

In the complaint, Carl Pasowicz, a teacher with stellar performance reviews, states that on March 22, he found a Bears doll in the classroom where he teaches history, and placed it in a clearly visible spot in front of the classroom – as is his routine with lost items – so that its owner could reclaim it. The day back after a school holiday the doll was discovered hanging by its neck from a cord in the classroom.

Fellow teacher, Gregory Jackson, whom the complaint characterizes as a “violent person,” physically assaulted Pasowicz in the school in front of witnesses, falsely accusing Pasowicz of “allegedly lynching a doll.”

The complaint also alleges that defendants, the Chicago Board of Education, former Principal Joyce Dorsey Kenner and former Assistant Principal (now head principal) Rickey Harris contributed to Pasowicz’s injuries “by instructing teachers, employees, personnel, and students of the Chicago Board of Education to falsely and maliciously label Plaintiff a racist, including the phony allegation that Plaintiff tied a string around the 'Bears' doll’s head like a noose…”

The complaint further notes that Board of Education’s approval and adoption of terrorist and racist groups such as ANTIFA and BLM, whose racist goals are directed at white people, to operate in Chicago Public Schools, “led to or were the moving force behind the deprivation of Plaintiff Carl Pasowicz’s constitutional rights.”

On October 12, 2022, Pasowicz filed a charge of race discrimination, racial harassment, color discrimination with the Illinois Department of Human Rights (IDHR) against the named defendants in the complaint. In 2022, Pasowicz received a right to sue from the IDHR.

Whitney Young H.S. is located on the Near West Side, and its student body is one-third Black, one-third Hispanic and a third White.