We, the veterans and survivors of COVID, learned quite clearly the meaning of “herd immunity.” Enough people are vaccinated against a disease, so the few who actually contract the disease do not infect everyone else. It’s a strategy that has served us well since the 1930s.
After seeing a few MCPS teachers get busted, and then protected, for unbelievably bigoted behavior, I think some of them also suffer from herd immunity. It works like this.
Suppose you’re a teacher at Parkland Magnet Middle School, deep behind progressive lines in Aspen Hill and cozily within Council Member Kristin Mink’s district. Suppose you also live in that area. Your entire social scene is radical progressive. Your co-workers think like you, your friends think like you, your neighbors think like you, and your social-media echo chamber thinks like you. This confluence may make you think that everyone thinks the way you do. As a result, you may think it’s perfectly OK to post threatening and violent graphics on your public Facebook page.
The above lead image was sent to us by a concerned resident. The day we received it I verified that the teacher’s cover photo indeed depicted “8647,” which has come to mean support for the assassination of Donald Trump. A few weeks later, while preparing this post, I again searched for the teacher’s Facebook page, but it is no longer available. Presumably this school employee got religion and is now being a bit more cautious.
According to lawshun.com, “an accessory (someone who assists or encourages a principal offender) may be punished in the same way as a principal.” If that were true, then this particular teacher has a potential problem. That aspect of this incident is beyond me.
The matter here isn’t free speech. The concern here is suitability for employment in a public school. Is this teacher expositing such views to his students, or encouraging them to engage in criminal activity, or harassing students with a different world view? At a minimum an investigation is necessary.
We had similar incidents with DEI teacher Sabrina Khan-Williams and middle school teacher Angela Wolf. These teachers extolled violence on their publicly available social media accounts. They suffered little more than reassignment.
This moral laxity belies the disconnect in public school hiring. Not the students, parents, or taxpayers have any input into the hiring and retaining of teachers and administrators. All we do is write the checks to fund an enormous bureaucracy of increasingly diminishing value.
Let’s be clear: the vast majority of MCPS teachers work hard and are dedicated to their profession. Most employees in any organization, public are private, are similarly loyal. The difference is that in private businesses, the occasional employee who alienates a customer or other employees is liable for dismissal. We will never have that level of morality in MCPS. The few violent progressives teaching our children are protected from the moral consequences of their actions. The teachers’ union gives them herd immunity, and they misuse it to the detriment of everyone else.
The only way out of this disconnect is school vouchers.
