The black non-binary Jesus is gone from his Grade 7-8 classroom, as is the Pride flag.
So is Catholic teacher Paolo DeBuono, who hasn’t been seen at St. Antoine Daniel, a Toronto Catholic District School board school, since he got into a confrontation with a group of parents during a York Catholic District School board meeting on April 25.
The debate was over whether to raise the Pride flag at York Region schools next month.
He is seen on Twitter exchanging words with (and possibly goading) angry parents in the York Catholic education centre rotunda.
To this day, he portrays himself as the victim of the incident.
He’s still tweeting incessantly about his plight and about 2SLGBTQI issues.
One parent of a 13-year-old boy in his class told me she’s pleased to see DeBuono and his circus gone.
But she says school officials won’t tell her whether that is temporary or permanent.
The mom, who asked to keep her identity anonymous, says DeBuono–who still wears two masks–read his class a book about a trans boy who wants to become a girl the very first week of school.
She thinks that all the paraphernalia he put in his classroom was inappropriate.
“Part of the reason we sent him (my son) to a Catholic school was for a Catholic-based curriculum,” she said in a recent interview.
“Let them learn (about gender ideology) at an appropriate age and pace,” she said. “They don’t need to be exploring it in Grade 7.”
The mom said she’s extremely concerned about DeBuono’s two Twitter accounts (@misterdebuono and @pdbclassroom) which he uses primarily for his pro-2SLGBTQI activism.
“He’s tweeting all the time and on school days,” she said.
He even tried to bring a drag queen into the class. But the mom said she has assurances “that’s not happening.”
She wonders when he has time to teach and feels he’s not doing his job to adequately prepare her son for high school.
“My son said he’d (De Buono) go off on these tangents,” the mom said “And he constantly came home with no homework whatsoever.”
Her trustee Marie Rizzo has been useless about reining in this teacher and the school officials appear to want to sweep it all under the rug (which is par for the course). The teachers union protects him, she said.
Efforts to reach DeBuono were unsuccessful. He previously refused to comment and blocked me on Twitter.
Since being out of the classroom, he has produced a creepy YouTube video in which he offers a bounty of $500 to anyone who can identify Patricia De Amassi, who has been tweeting about his activities. He claims he wants to sue her.
The mom of one of his students says the videos he produces make her worried for her child’s safety.
“I don’t want him coming back at all,” she said. “I don’t want him anywhere near my children.”
He shouldn’t be teaching anymore.
The same goes for Kayla Lemieux, implicated in Boobgate at Halton District School Board.
The trouble is school boards are notorious for moving controversial teachers like these two from school to school, hoping parents won’t notice.
For educators who claim it’s all about the kids, they do a poor job of demonstrating that.
