I imagine one ring of Hell is just made up of school board meetings.
I’ve been convinced by the full-on adult tantrums and screaming matches we’ve seen over masks and critical race theory debates while parents also plead for accountability in racial or homophobic classroom incidents. These meetings have got to be The Sunken Place.
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Now, I don’t know what this Black superintendent from Enumclaw, Washington did to deserve his spot in Hell last week, but he found himself with a first class ticket when his presentation was interrupted by an onslaught of racial slurs.
That’s right. According to the Washington Post, while Superintendent Dr. Shaun Carey was presenting a report to a group of in person and virtual attendees at an Enumclaw school board meeting, two people crashed the Zoom meeting to play looped recordings of the N-word.
From the Post:
The Black superintendent of a Washington state school district was speaking to a mix of in-person and online board meeting attendees last month when he was suddenly interrupted. Someone with an image of George Floyd in their frame unmuted their microphone and played a looped recording of racial slurs — an act known as “Zoom-bombing.”
The person running the Zoom meeting quickly kicked the person out, the school district said, only for an elderly White man to then take over the screen and play the same racist track.
Police in Enumclaw, Wash., a town about 40 miles southeast of Seattle, announced on Wednesday they are investigating the Nov. 22 acts as hate crimes.
According to Insider, the board of directors returned to the meeting after a brief break to announce that it would continue in person. Moving forward, virtual attendees will only be able to watch and not interact during the meetings.
“The actions during the last board meeting will not be tolerated. It remains the goal of the district and the board to ensure ALL feel safe, welcomed, respected and valued within our schools and our communities. Let it be clear, hate has no home here,” the school board said in a statement.
Jessica McCartney, the public information officer for the district who was running the Zoom portion of the meeting, told Insider that the district is cooperating with law enforcement. An attendee had actually recorded the incident and posted it to Facebook. “Knowing it was more than one individual Zoom participant lessens the chance that this was a random ‘Zoombombing,’” McCartney told Insider.
The Post reports that investigators determined two different IP addresses were used to carry out the attack.
“Sadly, I had an experience this week that although wasn’t completely foreign to me in my many years of life, left me unsettled and disheartened,” Carey wrote in a letter, according to the Post. “The words and images used were aimed at degrading people of color. Regardless of whether or not the two individuals who carried out this hateful act were random ‘Zoom-bombers’ or members of our community, the actions are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
