To the editor:<\/p>\n
The auditorium was packed for the meeting of the Lee County School Board on Tuesday evening.\u00a0 The Cape High football team \u2014 players, parents, coaches \u2014 were there in support of former coach Tyler Murphy, who resigned last month after allegations he had sex with the mother of a player.\u00a0 Murphy is now trying to get his job back.\u00a0 The public comment portion of the meeting lasted nearly an hour, with 51 people given one minute each to comment on an issue before the board.\u00a0 Several people spoke, both for and against vaccination mandates, but the majority of speakers were focused on the firing of three teachers for their alleged social media postings in the wake of Charlie Kirk\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n
The district has not released the content of the teacher posts, nor has it explained how the posts came to their attention.\u00a0Through a reliable source, however, I have seen the posts and can report that it became immediately obvious that many, if not all, of the speakers demanding the firing of the teachers were unfamiliar with the actual content of the posts.\u00a0 The most common accusation was that the teachers celebrated Kirk\u2019s death; other speakers referred to the posts as \u201chate speech\u201d and others even accused the teachers of inciting violence.\u00a0These are teachers, not haters; there was no celebration of Kirk\u2019s death in the postings; what the teachers were guilty of was dissent from the MAGA world narrative that Charlie Kirk was an American hero and reverence must be paid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a landmark SCOTUS decision, the court said that neither students nor teachers \u201cshed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.\u201d\u00a0But no right is absolute; because of their professional responsibilities to their students, teachers are correctly held to a higher standard, but conformity to a popular opinion is not the standard.\u00a0Teachers\u2019 speech is protected if it does not cause disruption to the educational process or to the environment of the school.\u00a0It is difficult to imagine how these teacher postings about Charlie Kirk would disrupt the educational process of their schools.\u00a0In my opinion, firing the teachers and forcing their students to be taught by substitute teachers for extended periods of time would be a genuine disruption of the educational process.<\/p>\n
Superintendent Denise Carlin insults our intelligence when she claims these teacher firings are not politically motivated.\u00a0She has been, no doubt, under enormous pressure from the state to make an example of these teachers, but given the gravity of the dangerous precedent she is setting, many of us had hoped she would not give in.\u00a0These teacher firings have got nothing to do with Charlie Kirk and not much to do with freedom of speech; these firings are about creating a climate of fear, not only among teachers, but among administrators and even school board members. Dissent from our authoritarian Project 2025 agenda and we will come after you.\u00a0Your job, your reputation are safe so long as you keep quiet and go along to get along.\u00a0We can\u2019t fire every teacher we identify as liberal, but we can use fear and intimidation to stifle dissent.<\/p>\n
Three lives are in ruins.\u00a0And it\u2019s not just the teachers in question; it\u2019s their families and circle of friends.\u00a0 These are people devoted to making a difference in the lives of our children and we\u2019re tossing their dreams away over private remarks on social media that could be described, at worst, as insensitive.\u00a0A letter of reprimand in the teachers\u2019 personnel files and we could all have gotten on with our lives. But when everything is political our society is in big trouble.\u00a0 And we can see clearly this is exactly where we are headed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One speaker at the board meeting rightly pointed out that the teachers will most likely file lawsuits for wrongful termination and the costs to the board of defending against these lawsuits and possible monetary judgments if the courts find in favor of the teachers will all come out of taxpayer pockets.<\/p>\n
Ray Clasen<\/p>\n
North Fort Myers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the editor: The auditorium was packed for the meeting of the Lee County School Board on Tuesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-2198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}