A teacher at a California high school was filmed insulting her own students over a virtual Zoom chat, angry over parents’ opposition to the ongoing stalling tactics of the teachers’ unions over in-person learning, and also made racial insults about White students, according to Fox News.
The teacher in question is Alissa Piro, who teaches English at San Marcos High School in San Diego County. She was filmed by a family member of one of the students in attendance, and can be heard yelling at students on several occasions.
“If your parents want to come talk to me about how I’m not doing a good enough job in distance learning based on what you need as an individual,” Piro asked in a raised voice, “just dare them to come at me.” Piro added that she was “so sick to my stomach of parents trying to tell educators how to do their job.”
The footage comes after the local teachers union had voted to maintain a “hybrid model” of learning after over one year of exclusively online education. The hybrid model means that, for the remainder of the school year, students will attend in-person learning only two days a week, while the remaining three days will be virtual. Parents across the district were enraged, widely viewing this as yet another stalling tactic to allow teachers to do the bare minimum without having to fully return to work.
At one point, Piro also insulted a White student named Jake after he asked about whether or not some of the students could start their own “White Student Union.” Piro can be heard remarking “You don’t need a White Student Union, Jake. You get everything.”
The mother who filmed the footage admitted in a Facebook group for parents in the San Marcos district that she “held onto the video for three months and hardly told a soul, fearing retaliation,” but that she eventually shared the video after she “felt awful for not standing up for these kids sooner.” Describing Piro as “a bully,” the mother admitted that her son “tuned her out” whenever she went on such rants, “and was just trying to get through the class. That is exactly what’s wrong with education.”
The mother said she directly reported Piro’s behavior to the principal, Adam Dawson, but no action has yet been taken.
Teachers’ unions all across the nation, and especially in California, have taken full advantage of the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shutdowns to make increasingly absurd demands, including issues that have nothing to do with the pandemic, before returning to in-person learning. As previously reported, one recent example is the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the largest teachers’ union in the city, demanding that all teachers be given free subsidized child care before returning to in-person learning. Despite parents being nearly universally outraged at the opportunistic stalling tactics, local governments have, more often than not, continued to bend to the wills of the unions.