I Went To Cuba For Spring Break And All I Got Was This Lousy Fine

Super cool high school teacher bends the rules to take gifted students on life-changing field trip. It’s the stuff that “Stand and Deliver”, “School of Rock” and many other terrible movies are made of, but this time it happened for real. And the rule the teacher bent? Just a little bitty, old trade and travel embargo because this field trip was to Cuba.

Nat Turner and about a dozen of his students from alternative New York City public school Beacon School took a trip to Cuba this spring and got caught and are now facing fines of up to $65,000 each. New York Post reports that Ruth Lacey, the principal of Beacon School, originally claimed she knew nothing about the trip, but later remembered turning Turner’s proposal for the trip down, saying this was not a school sanctioned trip. The Post reports, however, that this year’s trip is one of many that Turner has taken with students dating back to 2000 and that it was advertised on the school’s website. New York Times has this to say about how the trip happened:

The students and chaperones said that the trip was organized by Pastors for Peace/Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, a nonprofit group in Manhattan…. This year’s trip included interviews of a 15-year-old prostitute and of a homeless man in Havana, and also a visit to La Zorra y El Cuervo — the Fox and the Crow — an Afro-Cuban jazz club in the Vedado section of Havana, where two of the students jammed with the musicians.

Of course, the Post op-ed today threw in its two cents about liberal lefties being nostalgic for communism and how the school board is not taking this as seriously as it could, but Guanabee thinks Mr. Turner is totally the kind of teacher we’d be hot for.

HS SPURS FUROR WITH CUBA TRIP [New York Post]
Manhattan School Challenges U.S. Rules and Sends Students on a Spring Break Trip to Cuba [New York Times]
TEACHING CONTEMPT . . . [New York Post]