Facebook 'Selfie' Provokes Debate On Online Civility, Teacher Diversity
Hartford teacher Heather Zottolla, left, took a Facebook post by Shelley Best, right, personally, saying it insinuated "that because I'm white, I can't teach children in Hartford."
HARTFORD — Teacher Heather Zottola was at a training session for city educators on the evening of Sept. 2, hearing about ways they can better serve students of color — the bulk of Hartford's students — when she noticed one of the attendees angling a cellphone camera in her direction.
"I remember thinking, at first, 'Oh, she's taking a selfie.' Then I was like, 'Oh, look it, I'm in her picture,'" Zottola recalled this month. The woman, city board of education member Shelley Best, was seated only a few feet away in a downtown banquet room.
"What I should have said to her that night, what I thought to say to her, was, 'How did our selfie come out?' And just kind of get a feel for why she was taking it," said Zottola, 45, who did not know or recognize Best, an A.M.E. Zion minister, a social justice commentator, and one of two African Americans on Hartford's nine-member school board.
Back home that night, Zottola mentioned to her husband that a woman attending the dinner presentation had taken selfies — photos of herself — but that she seemed to intentionally include Zottola in the frame, "and I wonder why."
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people in Best's social media network had already learned the reason in real time as Best raised a blunt question about who was in the room that evening.
The head of the Hartford teachers' union, Andrea Johnson, would later say that she was "appalled" when she saw the Facebook post that would trigger pained conversations over teacher diversity and online civility.
All Zottola knew was that she felt uneasy when she went to bed that night.
The next morning, she asked one of the consultants at the multi-day training if he knew the woman who was taking photos. The man pulled up Best's Facebook page and showed it to Zottola, a magnet theme coach who has spent her 23-year teaching career at Noah Webster, a prekindergarten-to-grade 8 school in Hartford's West End.
Zottola had to leave the room to collect herself.
'Don't Look Like Us'
Best, 53, said she grew up in northwestern Connecticut in the 1960s, in Norfolk, where her father was an activist and Best was the only black child in her Facebook 'Selfie' Provokes Debate On Online Civility, Teacher Diversity - Courant Community:
