He’s a Grade 7 and 8 teacher in the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) who appears to be obsessed with 2SLGBTQI and trans rights.
Paolo De Buono teaches at St. Antoine Daniel School in the Jane and Wilson Ave. area of Toronto.
His Twitter feeds suggest he spends far more time tweeting about LGBT and trans issues than teaching students.
He has two Twitter feeds, one in his own name @misterdebuono, which he claims is his personal account and another called @pdbclassroom or The Rainbow Room, which according to him, is his school account.
The lines are constantly blurred between the two, with both mostly full of tweets exhibiting his obsession with gay and lesbian issues and with getting a religious book called Fully Alive (which preaches family values) out of the Catholic system.
His Twitter activity was brought to my attention by a series of teachers who believe his constant postings to be highly inappropriate given that he is a teacher in the faith-based Catholic system.
Even though his tweets appear to go against many provisions of the TCDSB social media policy–which indicates that violations may result in discipline or termination –nothing seems to have been done to stop him.
That policy states that personal accounts “should not identify a person’s position” or contain content that relates to a teacher’s “daily activities at school” (he appears to try to protect himself by claiming some of his messages do not relate to the TCDSB).
The policy states all social media interaction must be “formal, courteous and professional in tone” and pictures of classrooms or the school environment “must not be shared” on personal social media accounts.
He appears to violate the privacy issue with this tweet, among others:
His Twitter feeds regularly include a video of him making various pronouncements about gay and lesbian issues:
On the recent International Day of Pink, he wore this mask declaring he was against homophobia and transphobia. It was on his school account:
He has also bragged that he intends to the first Catholic teacher to bring Drag Queen story hour to his classroom:
In the past few days, he’s been obsessed with delivering a deputation to the York Region Catholic School Board about flying the Pride flag during Pride month at all of that board’s schools.
One wonders when this activist – who seems to perceive himself as a kind of messiah – actually has time to teach his students. Apparently, the only religion to which he’s exposing them is that related to activism.
I wrote to him asking him for comment on whether he felt his Twitter activities were appropriate. He did not respond by e-mail but recently posted this as if goading me to do a story:
As I’ve discovered, De Buono is not alone in his ability to tweet controversial and inappropriate comments with impunity.
This kind of activity is far more rampant in the woke public boards.
However, it makes one wonder who is running the show.
The teachers unions? The principals? Board directors?
Or has education in this province become one massive free-for-all where a Catholic teacher spends more of his time pushing his gender and 2SLGBTQI agenda than actually providing his students with a good grounding in academics?
