The Other McCain

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Math Teacher Goes Berserk

Posted on | May 20, 2023 | Comments Off on Math Teacher Goes Berserk

Just a typical day in a Wisconsin school:

Brenda Poulos remembers working in Kenosha last Friday when she received a series of texts from her son.
“I know he’s not supposed to use his phone in school, so the fact that he texted me was already, something’s up right,” Poulos said. “He said, ‘Mom, something’s going on at school. They fired our teacher and something bad is going on.”
Poulos’ son, Ethan, is a seventh-grade student at John Long Elementary. He told WISN 12 News he was in math class on Friday [May 12] when his teacher became upset and started making threats after discovering a swastika drawn in a notebook.
“Five seconds later, he went on this ramble about how this was a disgrace to his people and how he wanted to scorch Earth on us and how he was apparently going to cause pain on all our families,” Ethan said. “How he’d send his daughter to our house with a baseball bat and that he had 17 guns and he wasn’t afraid to use them.”
“I was scared. I had never heard a teacher say that to me or any kids before,” Ethan said.
According to a criminal complaint filed Monday afternoon in Ozaukee County Circuit Court, David Schroeder, 46, of Grafton, was charged with terrorist threats — create risk of causing result.
According to Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Lindsay, the school never contacted law enforcement. Lindsay said police only became involved more than an hour after the incident, when parents contacted police saying they were concerned their children weren’t safe with Schroeder in the community and with admitted access to guns. After police arrived at the school, the entire class was sent home early.
“It was chaos. There were a lot of kids in office area, panicked parents coming to get their kids,” said Sgt. Sean Fuerstenberg with the Grafton Police Department.
Police said they contacted Schroeder, who voluntarily turned himself in and was arrested on Friday.
In court Monday, the prosecutor said he was particularly concerned that Schroeder mentioned that he had a number of firearms.
Judge Paul Malloy, who is presiding over the case, did not take Schroeder’s actions lightly.
“The time when somebody can blow off steam and have a meltdown, that bird has flown a long time ago,” Malloy said.
According to the complaint, Schroeder told the students that he was Jewish, that “all Jews have guns and that he had 17 guns in his basement and that he would ‘F’ them up.”
Schroeder bonded out of jail on Tuesday. As a condition of his bail, he was ordered to first turn over any dangerous weapons to the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Office.
The principal indicated to police that Schroeder was already under investigation for “other concerning or inappropriate behavior towards students,” and the school district had already determined his contract would not be renewed for next year.

In other words, this guy had been a known problem before he went berserk in the classroom. And just by the way, if drawing swastikas in your notebook was some kind of human-rights violation, basically every kid in my childhood schools would have been under investigation. Our fathers’ generation had fought World War II, which was a subject of lots of TV shows (e.g., Combat!) and movies (e.g., The Longest Day) that we watched as kids, so we were fairly saturated with that stuff about fighting the “Krauts” (as the Germans were habitually referred to in the G.I. slang dialogue of those old movies). Because a swastika is a simple thing to draw (as opposed to say, a Stuka dive bomber or a Tiger tank), basically every schoolboy drew them, in notebooks, on desks, etc. It had no deeper meaning in our minds. Certainly the boys who drew swastikas — and I mean, literally every boy did, back in the 1960s and ’70s — did not intend it as signifying support for totalitarianism, or sympathy toward Germany, least of all Jew-hating. It was like drawing Batman (another favorite schoolboy doodle) or hot rods, just stuff that boys did, without any political intent. But that was long ago, in what may now be viewed as a Golden Age of political incorrectness, when a popular comedy on TV was Hogan Heroes, with the Nazis played for laughs.

(By the way, I’m sure every guy my age grew up assembling models of various WWII tanks and planes. You could order a Tiger tank model kit or a Stuka bomber kit via Amazon, but you’ll also need to order some Testors paint and glue. DO NOT SNIFF THE GLUE! Because I have to tell you kids everything . . .)



 

 

Category: Education, Wisconsin

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