An educator in Pennsylvania may have succeeded in making himself the latest example of why parents should consider homeschooling.
According to police, a teacher who works around small children every day in an elementary school was arrested last week after he became enraged when a makeshift plastic barrier he set up to prevent the spread of COVID was removed.
WPMT-TV reported that in the city of York, Chad Gerrick, 50, showed up to Sinking Springs Elementary School to teach. Upon arrival, the sixth-grade teacher discovered that his special barrier was gone.
Chad Gerrick, a teacher at Sinking Springs Elementary School, allegedly threatened school officials after a plastic barrier he had erected in his classroom for COVID-19 safety was removed, police say. https://t.co/OXXInjLGgJ
— WPMT FOX43 (@fox43) October 12, 2021
Per the report, the school’s maintenance staff had taken it down, and so Gerrick went to speak with school administrators about the matter.
That’s when Gerrick allegedly did something drastic: He threatened to kill those who denied him his safety net, according to a witness.
A person who works in the school’s cafeteria said they heard a couple of very specific threats from the teacher.
According to the criminal complaint affidavit filed by Northern York County Regional Police, Gerrick wanted to shoot school officials. He also allegedly expressed a desire to spread COVID to others, if indeed he had contracted it from the children he was apparently afraid of.
According to the witness, Gerrick said he would “shoot all them f*****s” at the Central York Educational Service Center.
The teacher also allegedly stated that if he were to get sick after the barrier was taken down, he would “come to school and spread COVID to everyone I can.”
After the witness reported the alleged comments, Gerrick was arrested by police. He has been charged with a misdemeanor count of making terroristic threats.
No weapons were found in Gerrick’s car parked at the elementary school, but officers seized nine long guns and one handgun from his home, USA Today reported.
The teacher is suspended as the district investigates the alarming allegations against him. He is currently free on $25,000 unsecured bail, and is scheduled to appear on Oct. 22 for a preliminary hearing.
If these accusations are true, this is yet another example of how the establishment media has driven such fear into segments of the American public — specifically, the segments that still believe anything the establishment media reports — that otherwise reasonable people (giving Gerrick the benefit of the doubt, here) become completely unreasonable and make violent threats against people working all day with small children.
How does one go from presuming to halt the spread of COVID to wishing to kill those who deny them their preferred safe space? For that matter, why would any rational person wish to infect everyone around them with a disease they seem to live their life worried about?
Of course, if Gerrick thought a plastic barrier in a classroom was going to save his life, that should have been a red flag — maybe he should never have been teaching children to begin with.
Teachers are given far too much credit in a country where every police officer owns the actions of a few bad apples. If a cop justifiably shoots a criminal, all cops are deemed a scourge on society. But when an elementary school teacher allegedly threatens what sounds like a mass shooting, academia escapes similar scrutiny.
That couldn’t be because our Thin Blue Line generally leans right, whereas teachers and teacher unions generally lean in the same direction as the establishment media.
Could it?