Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a letter Monday to the Sarasota County school board and superintendent about a history teacher at Pine View School, a gifted magnet program.
The allegations, which came to the state's Office of Parental Rights, are these. The teacher routinely held political discussions in class. An eighth-grade student told her his parents had forbidden him from participating in them. According to the letter, she kept going anyway and continued using him as the designated conservative perspective in the room.
Then, the letter alleges, she labeled him a misogynist, spread that characterization around the school, and openly questioned the suitability and influence of his father.
He is thirteen or fourteen years old.
Understand the power differential here.
This is not two kids arguing at lunch. This is not a professor sparring with a graduate student who can drop the class.
This is a government employee with grading authority over a child, allegedly attaching a word like misogynist to that child and circulating it through the building where he has to show up five days a week. An eighth grader cannot issue a statement. He cannot hire a lawyer. He cannot transfer to a different school at will.
If it happened as described, the damage is not that his feelings were hurt in a debate. It is that an adult with institutional power built a reputation for him and handed it to his classmates.
The union's response deserves its own paragraph.
The president of the Sarasota Classified Teachers Association, which is representing the teacher, told WFLA that the attorney general might have overstepped a little.
Then he said this: "I feel like he might have bigger fish to fry."
Bigger fish. A thirteen-year-old allegedly labeled and marked inside his own school, and the representative response is that the state's chief legal officer should find something more important to do.
We will remember that framing the next time somebody explains that teachers unions exist primarily to protect children.
Now the part where we are consistent, because we have been all year.
The teacher denies it. She told reporters that what she read in the attorney general's letter is not accurate compared to the actual investigation.
No disciplinary finding has been made. The district investigation has been running for several months and is not finished. Uthmeier himself wrote "if true" throughout, which is the correct construction.
We have defended due process in these pages for people we like a great deal less than a history teacher. We said it when a former NIAID adviser took the Fifth. We said it for ActBlue employees. We said it about a daycare worker in Fort Worth and about a juror in Massachusetts whose family got run out of their home by a mob.
So we will say it here. She is entitled to a fair investigation and a finding based on evidence, not on a letter and a news cycle.
But notice what that actually demands of the district, and it is not nothing. The letter states she has been the subject of multiple HR investigations initiated by multiple parents, and that she is still in the classroom. Uthmeier gave the superintendent until October 1 to report what the district has done or intends to do.
Finish the investigation. Publish the findings. If the allegations are false, say so clearly and defend her by name. If they are true, act.
What is not acceptable is several months of process, multiple parent complaints, and no answer.
This is the second one in a month.
In August, Uthmeier wrote a similar letter to the Alachua County school board. A mother there alleged a teacher had classmates vote to give her conservative son a Most Likely to Become a Dictator award, then tried to make him walk to the front of the class to accept it. He refused. That teacher is facing potential license revocation.
Two Florida districts. Two conservative students. One organized classroom humiliation and one label spread through a school.
Maybe it is a coincidence. Maybe two families independently invented remarkably similar stories about remarkably similar treatment.
Or maybe some adults have decided that a kid holding the wrong opinions is fair game, and are surprised to learn the state of Florida disagrees.
Either way, somebody should finish an investigation and tell the parents what they found.
- Article Source:
The Post Millennial
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