Last week, Van Nuys High School art teacher Lorcan Kilroy was suspended for 11 days after he sent a letter to a student’s parents criticizing the student’s disrespectful behavior in the classroom. While the Los Angeles Unified School District contends that Kilroy’s suspension and transfer from Van Nuys High School had nothing to do with the letter, Kilroy says, “Abusive teachers, abusive students. It’s abuse. Why are we tolerating that?”
The saga began when a female student of Kilroy’s directed an anti-gay slur at him and wrote a note stating, “Imma slap the s*** out of you.” The administration did nothing about the student behavior, so Kilroy wrote a letter to the student’s parents:
This senseless apathy is a malignant sore, a cancer on the energy and morale of the whole class. This is dismal, pathetic, self-absorbed and destructive. You and your kid are part of a family and you are partly responsible you’re your kid’s behavior. In terms of rule breaking or disturbing behavior in schools your kid does it it because they want to. Its not impulsivity, its not bad home situations, its not a broken family, its not bad economics or poverty, its not anything else except their decision to do it because they like to indulge themselves….Please do not respond to this letter by staging a conference to come dribble and whine like many do about you or your kid’s personal difficulties or your hard life.
Kilroy cannot enter the Van Nuys High School campus from August 13 to September 23, and has been transferred to Lawrence Middle School in Chatsworth. Kilroy said, “I’m not proud of the letter, the letter is overly harsh. I’m not asking for sympathy from the letter.”
At the same time, Kilroy penned a letter to the Superintendent and Board Members of LAUSD. Kilroy accuses the district of having “segregated dozens of Hispanic kids from poverty into my classes, (kids who you disproportionately suspended for offenses like willful use of violence, threats, obscenities, possession of knives and explosives, sexual harassment, stealing, and defiance, and kept their records secret from me in defiance of State Law Ed. Code 48900), a student called me the word faggot. I reported it to you and you did nothing of consequence….Added to this another teacher at the school was witnessed to have choked a kid and threatened his life and you did nothing, indicating that teacher’s approach is by contrast an excusable approach to problems. You have no moral problem with this.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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