As we slowly begin to unpack and unravel the historic ball of confusion once known as the pandemic, the debris that remains only serves as a reminder of all that we missed while looking in the wrong direction.
Despite the surreptitious teaching of the LGBTQIA+ agenda and other sex-laden ideologies that we finally noticed, It was the chickens of the racist and anti-authority home-training/school indoctrination that we ignored which slowly came home to roost.
For years, we heard of sporadic instances where teachers were violently confronted and/or challenged by their students. However, over time, these violent “instances” have increased exponentially in the aftermath of a George Floyd and post-COVID America. Prior to, the Left spent the entirety of the Trump administration equally stirring up the pots of both racism and authoritative dissent. As a result of these factors, we have school staff and faculty being assaulted with impunity of the likes we have never seen.
In early 2023, a Florida school faculty member was savagely beaten by a 270-lb student after attempting to stop him from, of all things- playing his video game in class.
This from Flagler Live:
“Joan Naydich, the 58-year-old Matanzas High School paraprofessional attacked by one of her special education students on Feb. 21 had alerted the classroom teacher as far back as late August of the student’s aggression and belligerence, according to a petition for an injunction she filed at the end of February.
Naydich in the document says she suffered two broken ribs when 17-year-old Brendan Depa rushed her, threw her across the floor of a school hallway, then punched and kicked her repeatedly as she appeared unresponsive.
The incident drew international attention for its violence, captured on surveillance video–there is no footage of what took place in the classroom prior to the attack–but also put a spotlight on the vulnerability of school employees in certain situations, and in this case with a special education student with autism who had special
needs, was medicated, and was known to have significant psychological issues, as court papers have confirmed.
The injunction document Naydich filed on Feb. 27 reveals for the first time in her words what took place– and indicates that, in fact, a Nintendo game did play a role in the incident. Depa had reported to a sheriff’s deputy that he became angry when the aide took a Nintendo game away from him. That detail was reported by the deputy in his arrest report. Naydich, on a GoFundMe page now verging on $100,000 in contributions, disputed that she had taken away the Nintendo game. “For the record, I NEVER took or touched any device. This information was incorrect and may have been said by the other party when being taken into custody,” Naydich wrote.
The account Naydich provides fills in the time between what took place immediately before the attack, in the classroom.
“He was told to put the Nintendo switch away,” Naydich wrote in the injunction narrative. “20 min prior to the end of class, Brandan took his switch out once again and was told to put it away. The teacher was then notified about the distraction (switch) and when questioned regarding why the switch was out in class, Brandan began to get highly irritated. He then began to call out vulgar names,” one of which is as vile as it gets when addressed to women or girls, “and got up to spit in my face. While walking out of the classroom to go to the dean’s office, I was attacked in the hallway.”
While abhorrent and horrific on its own, this was not the first incident the aide had with the nearly 300lb student. “The injunction document asks the petitioner to report any relevant prior incidents. Naydich reported on an incident on Aug. 29 involving Depa. “Over the course of the week Brendan’s behavioral changes were very apparent and address[ed] to multiple teachers. This particular day once the teacher left the room Brendan
repeatedly called me ‘bitch’ and to ‘mind my own fucking business.’ I immediately went to tell the teacher when he started using profanity again, saying, ‘you are too fucking old, you are too fucking slow, bitch.’”
Flagler Live also reports that Naydich has “shown no interest in mitigating what penalties Depa might face,” causing the defense to have a “much steeper climb to convince the prosecution to plead.” Oddly enough, after her recovery, teaching assistant Naydich received backlash for refusing to help lower the autistic student’s looming sentence, despite already having an extensive rap sheet at only 17.
Isolated Incidents? Not Hardly.
In a similar story, other disconcerting incidents at Matanzas reveal that this was not an isolated occurrence:
“Less than three weeks before the Matanzas High School incident, school board members had received a long letter from a Wadsworth Elementary teacher for 16 years, on leave at the time, who related disturbing incidents involving a young student with a history of serious behavioral issues who had brought bullets to school and
stomped on them to make them go off (they did not).
The teacher reported the incident but was placated by the administration. The student got “a few days’ suspension,” the teacher wrote the board members– then went on to threaten her after his return. The
administration again placated her.
“I looked through documentation (that my admin said didn’t exist),” the teacher wrote in the Feb. 2 letter, “to find EVERY teacher the student had was concerned about behavior. There is NO point in going to Human Resources, as a matter of fact, for several people, including myself, were punished harder for ‘telling.’” The teacher does not
explain what she meant by “punished,” but frames her letter in accounts of the 6-year-old who shot Amy Swerner on Jan. 6, in an elementary school in Newport News, Va.
These attacks are not only growing in frequency, but in severity.
According to Forbes, one in three teachers have been threatened by students as well as from parents. “One in three teachers reported at least one incident of verbal harassment or threatening behavior from students during the pandemic, with almost as many (29%) reporting harassment or threats from a parent.
Around 14% of teachers said they had been violently attacked by a student, according to the survey of pre-K to 12th grade school employees, carried out between July 2020 and June 2021. One teacher who ended up in hospital following an assault by a student told researchers: “I have been physically assaulted multiple
times by students in the building and they know that not only is there
no one to stop them, but there will be no consequences either.”
Education Week offers similar reporting, adding, “More than 4 of every 10 educators said at least one teacher in their district has been physically assaulted or attacked by a student in the past year, a new EdWeek Research Center survey found. “We had the worst year in terms of behavior and outbursts from students and parents we have ever [had],” said a middle school principal in Michigan who took the survey. “It was a year of emotional outbursts that we weren’t prepared for.”
Regardless of its appearance today, this is looking much less like an epidemic and more like a pandemic. These widespread attacks on teachers are not merely a biproduct of pent-up angst and frustration, but a carefully assembled, ticking time bomb, wreaking collateral damage of unpredictable levels.
How bad it will get remains to be seen, but a deeper delve into this particular ocean of uncharted waters reveals just how much harm these ‘home-grown terrorists’ have already wrought. Stay tuned.