Can a teacher be canned for a five-year-old pic on his personal social media?
A veteran Oklahoma teacher may lose his teaching license after a five-year-old photo surfaced of him and his son mock-stabbing his daughter donned in a Donald Trump mask.
Oklahoma Watch reports Regan Killackey and his kids were “goofing around” in a party supply store in 2019 when the “stabbing” took place, a photo of which later was posted to Killackey’s personal Instagram page (pictured).
Following the July assassination attempt against Trump, an anonymous tipster notified the Oklahoma Department of Education of the photo, which led the DOE to take “swift action.”
Revoking a teacher’s certificate is “typically reserved for serious offenses, such as child abuse, predatory behavior or criminal charges,” according to the report. But Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters “prioritized” the matter.
Referring to Killackey and “another teacher” without actually naming them at a July 31 meeting, Walters said “We want to make sure to send a message loud and clear: no one will be able to teach in the state of Oklahoma if they advocate for the assassination of President Trump, or any elected official.”
Walters later posted an audio clip of his remarks to X, tagging Libs of TikTok and its proprietor Chaya Raichik, who posted about it Wednesday.
Last month the Oklahoma DOE amended its complaint against Killackey, adding a 2021 video clip discovered by an investigator of the teacher “heckling” a street vendor selling Trump-related merchandise.
Walters and the DOE also are trying to revoke teacher Alison Scott’s license after she posted “Wish they had a better scope” in reference to would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crook’s rifle.
MORE: Cancel culture comes back to bite the Left amid posts wishing Trump was assassinated
Middle Tennessee State University’s Ken Paulson, director of its Free Speech Center, said “It doesn’t matter if people find the remarks unpalatable. No amount of political outrage can undermine their constitutional rights.”
Paulson added Walters and the DOE would have to prove Killackey’s photo and Scott’s comments were made “as part of their professional duties, not as private citizens.”
FIRE’s Aaron Terr added that neither Killackey’s photo nor Scott’s remark “sounded like incitement or true threats.”
In 2018, Killackey took one of his AP English classes to the state legislature allegedly because his students “too had had enough with their legislature as being inactive to fully fund education”:
Killackey was featured in a 2021 Education Week article in which he claimed his district’s “stated efforts to better serve its students of color started to morph” soon after GOP Governor Kevin Stitt signed into law a bill that allegedly “severely curtails classroom discussions on race.”
Before the bill, “at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests […] the district’s superintendent doubled down on fighting all the ways racism permeates the school’s hallways and denies a litany of opportunities for students of color,” the report claims.
Killackey said he was “upset” because he used to “talk about these things openly and honestly with all of my students, and they need to be talked about openly and honestly.”
The report notes Killackey was part of an ACLU lawsuit in which he alleged “administrators told teachers to avoid using [terms] in the classroom like ‘diversity’ and ‘white privilege.’”
MORE: Prof posts ‘Let’s hope today’s events inspire others’ after Trump assassination attempt
IMAGE: Libs of TikTok/X
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