Frustrated parent at Natomas Unified School District board meeting 9/1/21. (Photo: screen capture https://natomasusd.news)
The Rest of the Story of Marxist Natomas Teacher’s Indoctrination of Students
Natomas School Board Member and Superintendent discuss timeline and board meeting
By Katy Grimes, September 7, 2021 4:27 pm
Last week the Globe reported on the Sacramento Inderkum High School teacher who proudly admitted to politically indoctrinating his students in Marxism/Communism, on a recent undercover Project Veritas video.
“Gabriel Gipe said that his intention is to radicalize students into supporting Marxist ideas by using the public school system as an avenue to incentivize them to participate in fringe extracurricular events,” Project Veritas reported. “I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries…Scare the f*ck out of them,” Gipe said.
Gipe was terminated by the school district ahead of the intense Natomas Unified School Board meeting last Wednesday where parents showed up in droves demanding justice for their children, demanding the teacher be fired, and even demanding criminal prosecution.
“Video of furious parents at the Natomas school board meeting is available, before the board took a recess during the meeting, came back, took another recess, and then disappeared out the back door before the meeting ended, according to several parents,” the Globe reported.
Despite the school board meeting getting really heated, the Board members allowed angry and frustrated parents to speak for one and a half hours before recessing one final time, ending the meeting.
The Globe has learned that there was more to the decision by the board to recess the meeting and leave the building.
NUSD Board Member Micah Grant and NUSD Superintendent Chris Evans clarified the details and the timeline with the Globe.
While parents were justifiably upset, afraid for their children, and angry that the teacher had been teaching Marxism and Communism at the high school for three years in his AP History class, both Grant and Evans said not all of the people at the meeting were parents or from the community.
They had been informed earlier in the day by law enforcement that some “political groups” would be at the meeting. The Globe heard Antifa would be there. Superintendent Evans said he’d also heard this but it appeared they did not attend the meeting after all.
With this information, Superintendent Evans offered the school board the opportunity to hold the meeting virtually as state law allows, but the board opted for the in-person meeting.
Friday before the Wednesday September 1 board meeting, board members and Superintendent Evans were made aware of the video and provided quotes by Gabriel Gipe. By the time he actually saw the video, Grant said it had been released on Twitter.
Both Grant and Evans said the video appeared correct on substance. “What the teacher said in the video was awful,” Superintendent Evans said. He noted that videos can be spliced, and said he asked Project Veritas for the entire video, rather than clips. “Beyond that, we do our own investigation,” he said. “Too often we hide behind ‘it’s a personnel issue.’ Our imaginations run wild. We’re human. So we dug in to emails, and talked with former and current students.”
Superintendent Evans also noted that the Inderkum Principal is new to the school this year, so there wasn’t much she knew about the teacher or the past years in his classes, since school had only been in session 13 days.
Board Member Grant said while he would have liked to get out ahead of the controversial video with information to parents before the board meeting, the board policy states that only the Board President can speak publicly on behalf of the board. Grant issued a personal statement ahead of the meeting but was criticized “that it did not go far enough.”
My statement on the Project Veritas video that was released this morning. pic.twitter.com/o8DERO1JlI
— Micah Alexi Grant (@alexigrant) August 31, 2021
“Part of what I tried to explain in the letter is some of the things he [Gipe] placed in his classroom were new. Others were not,” Superintendent Evans said, referring to photos of China’s Chairman Mao Zedong posters in Gipe’s classroom, as well as an Antifa flag. “We have discovered that some of the materials that were on the wall were added, at the earliest, May of 2021. Whether those posters were added prior to the school year or placed on the wall for the first 13 days of this school year – we are not yet sure. However, they are gone and removed,” Superintendent Evans says in his letter to the community.
Superintendent Evans told the Globe, “Not only is it against school policy and board policy, but he broke the sacred trust between school and parents. We fired him well before the meeting.” (His letter is below).
But that didn’t seem to be enough to those who attended the school board meeting. “And the board chose to stay and listen to a lot of vulgar and profane language,” Superintendent Evans said.
After a while, Evans said the board needed a break. Emotions were running high, and unbeknownst to the audience of parents and others, board members were receiving hateful and threatening text messages on their cell phones during the meeting. Law enforcement and legal counsel at the meeting were concerned about the threats.
The Globe was provided one voicemail message that went on for over 1:30 minutes, in which the caller threatens board members and their family members with violence.
That was just one message. Law enforcement at the meeting grew increasingly concerned both Grant and Evans said. Law enforcement and the legal counsel eventually told board members to recess and leave, and escorted board members out of the building.
It may have appeared to parents attending the board meeting that the board slipped out the back door to avoid the wrath of parents, but Superintendent Evans and Board Member Grant said the threats were growing in frequency and violence via text messages and email. Law enforcement told board members there were also threats on social media.
In the coming weeks and months, as we learn more about this school situation, and how teacher Gabriel Gipe survived numerous complaints by parents, the Globe will update the story.
Letter-to-Community-September-1-2021-Google-Docs
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Mr. O’Keefe and his courageous crew are some of the last gasps of real journalism in this country.
It’s good that this guy was exposed but he’s closer to the norm than an aberration in most of the state. Nearly the entirety of the SF Bay Area and LA would consider him a role model. It’s been 10 years since I discovered that at the high school I graduated from in the 70s, Howard Zinn’s propaganda piece was THE Senior year high school history text.
Mr. O’Keefe and his crew are not legitimate journalists- they deceptively edit their videos to give a false impression and inject opinions that masquerade as fact. That isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda. I’m not defending Gabriel Gipe’s behavior but I hope that the evidence against consists of more than anything from James O’Keefe, since he is consistently dishonest, has no credibility.
Talk to your kids!
Unless and until more conservatives are willing to take up teaching as a career, the field will be filled with leftists who want nothing more than to indoctrinate kids with their propaganda. Rules and required curricula will not change them, they need to be replaced in order to correct the problem.
The union powers et al took away, long ago, all of the things that attract conservatives —– or even sensible liberals who care about and want to teach kids —– to this profession. The bureaucracy alone, never mind the requirement to be in lockstep and not have sovereignty and freedom in one’s own classroom, has kept them away.
School boards and administrators will never allow an actual conservative to teach. Ever.
Isn’t fundamentally changing America great
Actually, NO…
That was the longest eight years of my life… And he replaced Carter as the worst President ever…
Thank you for telling “the rest of the story” with a fair treatment of the NUSD board’s actions. It is too easy to pile on in, but you were able to give your readers a better understanding of how this has played out. Good journalism.
The entire District needs to make VERY clear that if ANY member of staff is the slightest bit confused, or perhaps thinks that the collective bargaining agreement gives them protection to engage in this kind of criminal behavior (and it is), they are mistaken. They can also expect to have their personal immunity pierced and face civil damages that could ruin them financially. Perhaps, if folks like Gipe face the civil and even criminal penalties their conduct so clearly deserves they will be a lot less eager to forget who they work for and the duties they owe in the future. And for every teacher who gets indignant and says “how dare you paint us all because of one bad apple??” I say “to hell with you. You HAD to know about this sumbitch and you did nothing!”. You are accomplices until you all hold each other to the high standards you signed up for. You can start by raising our school performance to say, 35th instead of 46th. You’re the so-called experts and already have ample resources to do so.
This needs to be state wide. In fact, responsible parents will take their children out of CA government schools, where students are indoctrinated, not educated. Extremism like this is not rare in CA schools. Larry Elder has pledged to do all he can to promote school choice vouchers. Vote to recall Newsom and elect Elder.
This school board as a whole needs to be fired for failing to protect the most important thing, our kids. They are not only responsible for what happened but complicit in what happens in the class room. If they promote CRT in any form is this not the same thing as what Gipe was doing.
They knew exactly who and what Gipe was and what he was really about. He is a leftist radical and I can guarantee he is just the tip of the iceberg.
Really alarming. Repulsive.
Mandatory audio & video in all public school classrooms. They can’t be trusted to correct this. They don’t think it’s even wrong, they just have to pretend to rectify it, because they got caught.
Yes, that critical finger they point at our police officers needs to be pointed back at themselves. How can a principal and staff not know what is taught or how a classroom is decorated/set up? I worked as a cashier at the airport and we had a camera and a microphone on us. These people are allowed to brainwash our children for hours every day and no one checks on them or monitors what they teach? Maybe more parents need to be allowed to observe the classrooms and hear the lectures on a regular basis.
While a reasonable argument can be made for ending the public hearing in the face of apparent direct threats to individual school board members, that does not address the underlying fact that no one in a position of responsibility in the school system was monitoring this teacher. I don’t know if the school administration’s assertion that there had been no prior complaints about the teacher is correct or not. Regardless, that doesn’t let the school administration off the hook. Project Veritas certainly found out about the teacher from someone. If the principal, school superintendent or school board knew nothing, that’s gross negligence and incompetence. If they did know but were ambivalent, or worse, knew and were complicit, that’s evil.
I have SOME regard for this particular school board in that they sat through almost the entire meeting and listened to the entire parade of speakers —– instead of calling the fire marshal as a cover for shutting the whole thing down from the very beginning, which would have happened and in fact DID happen on several occasions in my school district when a crowd showed up to speak out on a controversial agenda item.
California School curriculum has been anti-American for 30+ years and I’d bet many of these Educators take it for granted because it is what they were taught. 12 years ago I learned that Cesar Chavez is taught in schools as the Latino George Washington, an Alinsky trained community agitator is not a fine example for Americanism. They hide behind freedom of speech while holding a captive audience.
So far, when i read about parent / school board public meetings, I read or hear the same thing: the “board is scared for their lives”, the board are poor helpless victims in the face of “unruly”, vulgar”, types clearly lower and ignorant compared to the innocent upstanding board.
Do they all receive a script?
Most likely, those so called threats are probably from a script too. The left is full of dirty tricks and paid plants.
The fish always stinks from the head. This guy was given free reign for quite awhile. It’s problematic that district staff weren’t aware of the teachers behavior.
Overemphasis on the violent threats and tactics coming from the parents is cry bully behavior. ANTIFA itself is notorious for this, as are progressive politicians like AOC. Everyone that has followed ANTIFA has seen them torch property, pull innocent people out of cars, jump on car hoods, attack reporters, etc, etc. The list goes on. So when focusing on the violence, try to do it in a balanced way. Gipe condoned and encouraged ANTIFA violence. Tempers have been running high for years now. Parents should still try to remain under control, buts it’s just too easy to see the issue as one sided.
Following is an excerpt from the article linked below. I recommend reading the entire article. The multiplicity of problems with public school (lack of) education stems from SB 160. No real change in public education in California is possible without removing the rot at the care of public education.
“SB 160, also known as the Rodda Act, . . . legalized collective bargaining for school teachers in California in 1975. This law precipitated the downfall of public education in the Golden State, as the introduction of the unions into the educational process made for an adversarial relationship between school districts and teachers, thus undermining the “the common vision of excellence previously shared by administrators, teachers, parents, students, and community leaders.” The scope of negotiable issues uncorked by the Rodda Act includes wages, hours of employment, health and welfare benefits, leaves, transfers, reassignments, safety conditions, class size, evaluation procedures, organizational security, certain aspects of layoffs, procedures for grievances and discipline, etc.”
https://californiapolicycenter.org/defective-bargaining/
OMG! First, Gabriel Gipe and the people who allow him to post the communist posters in his classroom should be fired immediately. This is why we need to change the elected officials who allow this. The Democraps in charge want to turn California into another Cuba or Venezuela.
These people are child predators and physical violence is the answer.
I’m a little late to the game here, but another thing that caught my attention: the board left early because of potential threats. But they left all the parents behind to potentially be in that threat?