On Tuesday afternoon, the coming verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial loomed over Gotham Professional Arts Academy, a high school in Brooklyn.

“Around the neighborhood where school is, you know, choppers and police officers were all kind of getting prepared to deal with whatever was coming,” Robert Michelin, the school’s principal, said. “So, we sent an email out to our students and our faculty just saying, we understand the anxiety, we're all feeling the same way right now. No matter what the verdict is we're going to figure out how to move forward.”

What You Need To Know

  • At Gotham Professional Arts Academy, students discussed the verdict at a town hall meeting

  • The school has been incorporating the Black Lives Matter movement into lessons and meetings for months

  • Students also find inspiration in the movement for their art

By Wednesday morning, the school community was ready to discuss the news: that Chauvin had been found guilty on all three counts related to the killing of George Floyd. They delivered the news in a virtual town hall meeting.

“Our community of adults thought that the best thing we could do is arm our students with information,” Michelin said.

So he began by reading and explaining the verdict.

“Verdict count one,” he read.

The school focuses on the arts so the discussion was illustrated with courtroom sketches and an infographic showing just how rare it is for a police officer to be convicted in the death of a civilian.

Some students turned on their microphones to weigh in.

“What we see right now, honestly, I just don’t even want to talk because it’s so mind-boggling,” one student said.

And some were wary of calling the conviction justice.

“This is not going to bring him back. Like, it’s a life. He’s not going to be resurrected,” another added.

After the town hall, the students broke out into smaller meetings, and were asked to write about how the verdict made them feel.

“It serves as a moment of reflection, but also we can use that as material to create meaningful art, as we continue our commitment to the movement for Black lives,” Michelin said.

For many of them, that movement has already become part of their art, like a musical performance by sophomores called Looted Histories.

“George Floyd, he was one of us,” a student rapped.

Michelin says students feel empowered to bring these themes into their art in ways they haven’t been before.

“It’s been powerful to see how they think and what they feel in that space, which is often easier to convey emotion,” Michelin said.