‘Don’t call my teachers DEMONS’ | Texas superintendent posts viral rant on social media about the state of public schools

ABILENE, Texas — Abilene ISD Superintendent Dr. John Kuhn posted a lengthy rant addressing the state of public education amid newly-passed legislation, coupled with his frustration towards social media commenters calling his teachers “demons,” which had gone viral and been shared thousands of times as of this writing.

“Gosh where to begin? I’m eligible to retire in January, and I don’t want to because I feel like I owe the good people who hired me and this great community at least a few years of blood sweat and tears. I work for a great school board in a city I’ve absolutely fallen in love with. But holy moly do I want to pack it in right now. The burden is heavy,” Kuhn’s message began.

Kuhn said he spent hours listening to the impacts of recently-passed legislation on teachers and administrators, and then proceeded to mention numerous bills he had issue with, many of which he noted needed “clarifications” subsequently released by the bill’s authors. The bills he referenced in his post were: 

• A bill that says teachers are going to be required to catalogue every book in their classrooms (Senate Bill 13)
• A bill that says nurses can’t provide any health care and counselors can’t provide any emotional support without a written permission slip from parents (Senate Bill 12)
  • This one, Kuhn said, had a clarification put out saying nurses can provide a band-aid to a kid who is bleeding
• A bill that says school administrators who work on the side as referees or one-act-play judges are subject to a $10,000 fine per offense for working those jobs if they don’t present a contract to their school board (House Bill 3372)

Kuhn also expressed his displeasure with the highly-controversial school vouchers bill (Senate Bill 2), as well as the new bill that replaces the STAAR test (House Bill 8) with three shorter tests at the beginning, middle and end of each school year. Kuhn said he spent his conference day thinking about all of these changes, and then he got on social media and found commenters calling his teachers “demons” because they assigned an chapter of the book “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” as a reading passage for a freshman honors English class.

Kuhn admitted the book should likely be restricted for older kids in the 17-18 year range, but noted the reading assignment was assigned only to the honors class because the other 9/11-related reading was too easy of a reading level for them. The issue was some of the language in the book, which uses vulgar terms, but Kuhn said the foul language spewed in the comments about the teachers were equal or worse than the terms used in the book they were complaining about.

“My teachers aren’t demons,” Kuhn said. “They may have made a mistake in assigning this book to 15-year-olds rather than 17-year-olds, and for that there are people online saying they need to be fired … We can’t win in public ed anymore. This is absolutely ridiculous. If I make it to December, it’s gonna be a miracle … I just want you to know I’m sick of politicians playing divisive politics and leaving local public servants to clean up the mess. Public schools are apolitical entities with the job of teaching kids to think critically and become awesome humans. We aren’t perfect. We have missteps, because we are human organizations. But don’t call my teachers DEMONS while you cuss in the comments.”

Kuhn’s Friday morning post garnered thousands of shares, hundreds of comments and thousands of reactions. To read his full post, click here.