Florida teacher named Todd Harvey has caught the heat on the internet for allegedly throwing a Nazi salute at a German pupil and calling a biracial girl a “mutt.” In fact, there is an online petition to get him fired from his teaching job.
And the New York Post got the details;
“Todd Harvey is a serial abuser with more than 20 documented offenses toward minors in the classroom,” a Change.org petition says of the longtime teacher at Wharton High School in Tampa.
“He is a homophobic, racist, misogynistic, person who should not be a teacher at all.
“His immediate termination is demanded on behalf of parents and students,” states the petition, signed by nearly 350 people by Tuesday.
It also calls for a “thorough investigation” by school officials and law enforcement into the disturbing history of complaints first revealed in an exposé by the Tampa Bay Times.
The paper obtained district records that showed there had been at least 23 complaints of alleged misconduct since Harvey started teaching in 1997.
He was once suspended without pay for five days for making racially insensitive “disparaging” comments and also reprimanded for letting students pay him to boost their grades.
“I understand it is not uncommon for this man to reduce students to tears,” one parent complained as far back as 1999, the paper noted.
Officials threatened to fire him at least twice but instead allowed him to keep teaching — with one pupil complaining that his classes feel “barbaric,” according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Other complaints included for mocking Latino pupils, saying they were hairy and ate rice and beans — and refusing to call a German exchange student anything but “Germany.”
After a complaint from another German student, Harvey admitted performing a Nazi salute in class, but claimed it was part of a lesson on the Holocaust, according to the report.
A principal once conceded that “everyone” knew Harvey got a pitcher on the baseball team to deliberately hit an opposing player in the head. Harvey denied it.
Melanie Copeland told the Tampa Bay Times that Harvey once asked how she marked her race on government forms because she is biracial — alleging that he told her in the class that she should put “mutt.”
She was so upset, her mom eventually pulled her out of the school district.
Others also accused Harvey of bullying a transgender pupil who died by suicide, with police saying the pupil had been upset by a debate with Harvey that day.
A friend told the paper that the teacher tormented the vulnerable pupil by saying he looked like a “psychopath” and a school shooter.
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