Teacher tells 6th grade class that ‘Republicans are stupid’

April 7, 2012
by Howard Portnoy
HotAir.com

I suppose it can said of a Virginia elementary school teacher who allegedly told her students “Republicans are stupid” that she at least spoke her mind. Her actions are more defensible than those of a fellow Old Dominion State colleague who deviously tasked her students with finding flaws in the GOP presidential candidates but not in the lone Democratic candidate.

The Daily Caller reports that “as Republican voters were filing into the halls of [Colin] Powell Elementary School in Fairfax County to vote on Super Tuesday,” teacher Kristin Martin told her sixth-grade class that “Republicans are stupid” and “they don’t care about anyone but wealthy people and businesses.”

One of the students in the class told The DC:

It all started when this disabled kid came in and named all the Republicans candidates for Super Tuesday. She [Martin] said to him, ‘I don’t like them, I think that they are stupid.’

The blog additionally notes that Martin reportedly told the class that she had voted for Obama and that “Democrats do more for the community and schools.”

I reached out to John Torre, a spokesman for the school district, who said that the county’s investigation into the incident was “inconclusive.” The teacher, he told me, denies having made these statements, which means that in the district’s eyes it boils down to a case of “she said, they said.”

But not all the parents of children in Martin’s class are satisfied with that outcome. One mother, a self-identified Republican, is quoted by The DC as saying:

I felt like the teacher was brainwashing naïve, young children to believe people like me, my family and, to a certain extent, my daughter, were stupid.

The reaction is understandable, but I would find it far more instructive to know what a parent who is a Democrat thinks of this type of proselytizing—whether it happened or not.