As reported by The Blaze, hundreds of students from a New Jersey high school walked out of classes Tuesday to protest the suspension of a teacher who dared to talk about his concerns regarding safety following the Parkland, Fla., shooting last week.
Parents and students in interviews with local WPVI-TV said they are demanding the school reinstate Timothy Locke, 59, a history teacher and veteran of the Iraq War who served in the U.S. Air Force.
Principal Dennis Perry of Cherry Hill High School East — situated a short distance from Philadelphia across the Delaware River — threatened during a school meeting Monday to suspend students who participated in the walkout, the station said. But by Tuesday morning that declaration applied only to students who ventured off school property, WPVI reported.
Locke was immediately placed on leave in the days after the Parkland shooting after a student reportedly got upset when he raised concerns about the security and safety of the school, according to the local TV station.
It’s hard to imagine that a young person would be ‘triggered’ by the mere discussion of improving school safety, but that’s the society we live in today: “We demand solutions!” but by all means, shut up about them.
“I don’t even know who it was, personally,” said student Molly Phillips, who was in class on that day, in an interview with WPVI. “But it wasn’t right because what he was doing was [trying] to protect her, not hurt her.”
Ben Schore, a senior who organized the walkout, told the local station that the history teacher and war vet “brought up a real problem about how our school security lacks.”
“I feel like the school is not safe, and what happened in Parkland can happen to anybody,” student Harris Satterthwaite told WPVI. “And Mr. Locke, he was just trying to voice his opinion, and he was treated unfairly.”
There are four security guards who work at Cherry Hill High School East, students told the station, but none of them carry any firearms.
What’s even more insane is that not only was Locke suspended, but the Left-wing lunatics who run the school searched his bag for any weapons and ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, he told parents. (Related: Right-leaning Parkland, Fla., student calling for #NeverAgain movement to move OFF of ‘gun control.’)
“The idea of requiring him to take a psychiatric evaluation, it seems that they’re trying to twist this around now and use this against him,” Eric Ascalon, a parent, told the local station. “It’s disgusting.”
That’s one way of characterizing it; stupid and crazy are two additional ways.
What’s encouraging about this, however, is that a lot of parents seem to be backing their kids’ decision to oppose the suspension.
“This is what democracy looks like,” Pamela Barroway of Cherry Hill told WPVI. “It’s awesome. I think it’s a bright future, I think it’s really hopeful. It makes me hopeful.”
Another parent, Eric Satterthwaite, told the station that he came to join the protest “in support, solidarity… my son with the students. It’s all about activism. I think we need more of that now.”
The local station noted that phone calls to the idiot administrators at the school were not returned because…cowards. But the issue isn’t going away, either; there are plans to discuss it at a meeting next week.
A number of students are perplexed by the tone-deafness of school administrators.
“A lot of what the school here is doing is trying to shut out what happened in Florida, instead of saying ‘This is what we have to do, this is what we’re going to do next, how we can fix what we are doing,'” student Debbie Goldberg told WPVI.
J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.
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