A school district in California has placed one of its teachers on paid leave following allegations made by journalism nonprofit Project Veritas that the teacher was involved in illegal political activity in the classroom.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Natomas Unified School District said the video revealed a teacher’s “educational approach that is disturbing and undermines the public’s trust.”
The district said, following almost two days of investigation guided by the principles of democracy and due process, it found that the teacher identified in the video had committed “clear violations” of Natomas Unified’s political action guidelines, “which are aligned with Board Policy and California Education Code.”
Yesterday, NUSD shared a statement with the community regarding a video of one of our teachers. Here's an update on what we know and the district's next steps. https://t.co/MClkWQZNuj
— Natomas Unified (@NatomasUSD) September 1, 2021
“[T]he teacher, using his own money, purchased a series of rubber stamps. These stamps include an inappropriate image of Josef Stalin with an insensitive phrase, as well as other stamps with Fidel Castro, Kim Jung Un, and others,” it stated. “The district’s investigation did discover that at least during the 13 days of this school year, he was using those stamps to mark student work as complete.”
The self-proclaimed “far-left” high school teacher, identified as Gabriel Gipe in Project Veritas’s video released on Tuesday, talked about how to move his students further left and turn them into “revolutionaries.”
“I have 180 days to turn them into revolutionaries,” the Inderkum High School teacher in Sacramento told an undercover Project Veritas journalist.
Gipe shared that his political views were “probably as far-left as you can go.”
“Like, why can’t we, you know, take up arms against the state?” Gipe told the journalist. “We have historical examples of that happening, and them getting crushed and being martyrs for a cause.”
The video showed that Gipe had an Antifa flag and a poster of Mao Zedong, a Chinese communist dictator, in his classroom.
When a student complained that they were uncomfortable about the flag, Gipe said the flag “is meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable.”
“So if you feel uncomfortable, I don’t really know what to tell you. Maybe you shouldn’t be aligning with the values that this is antithetical to,” Gipe said.
By Li Hai
