FL: Rumors Surrounding Transgender Teacher Disrupts School Board
A school board meeting in Hernando, Florida grew heated due to rumors a transgender teacher threatened students. The teacher had been investigated and cleared by law enforcement and school officials.
by Evan Urquhart
A misheard remark? A joke blown out of proportion? A middle school teacher who seriously threatened their own students back at work? These are among the possibilities hovering over a story in Hernando County, Florida, where angry, unsettled parents are threatening to pull their children from Fox Chapel Middle School due to rumors that an incident where a teacher threatened their students was not taken seriously enough by law enforcement or the school.
Bay News 9, a cable news channel serving the Tampa Bay area, referred vaguely to “concerning comments” which led to a teacher being briefly suspended, until an investigation determined there was no “imminent threat.” Local CBS affiliate, Tampa Bay 10, included video of a parent threatening to pull her children out of school over the incident at the school board meeting last night.
Both stories mentioned rumors on social media, but declined to provide details about the source or substance of those rumors, or further reporting that could shed light on what actually happened at the school. Assigned was able to find one local, tabloid-style website that ran two separate stories on the incident which linked it to a recent shooting in Nashville, TN. The second story included a transcript of a message from the principal which R News claimed went out to parents at the school.
screenshot from R News
The article on R News claims to identify the teacher, a transgender man that the story misgenders and uses a previous name for. However, it also mentions that the Hernando County School District had informed them that their allegations were false, and their sources were not credible. Further complicating the picture, R News seems to have a hostile relationship with local authorities, going back several years. It is unclear to this outside reporter how reliable R News is as a news source, whether the site has served as a source where parents in Hernando County got their information, or if it is merely a reflection of the local rumors about the case.