Lisa Grimes Colleyville teacher resigns after video of her saying conservative Christians need to get COVID and die goes viral on social media. Texas school district and parents outraged.
A Texas middle school teacher has resigned after comments she believed to be making privately on school grounds earlier this week, went on to go viral and led to her ouster.
Lisa Grimes, an eighth grade discoveries and English teacher at Colleyville Middle School, had been chatting with two other colleagues in a school hallway when she stated, ‘Conservative Christians need to get COVID and die.’
Unbeknonwnst to the educator, the conversation was secretly being recorded (see below), with video of her ‘inflammatory’ views soon being widely shared on social media.
The comments had come about the educator’s frustration with how COVID had become a ‘political issue.’
In recorded video, Grimes said COVID vaccines were being given out the same way flu vaccines are, and said that if they had been given out immediately, the virus would be gone.
‘Please demand Lisa Grimes be fired immediately!’
‘The rest of my life is impacted because of politics?’ Grimes is heard saying. ‘Because of conservative Christian crap? I’m telling you, those conservative Christian people, they need to die, they need to get COVID and die.’
The conversation went on to be shared by CriticalRaceTheory, to the Canadian video conservative platform Rumble, and soon after causing wide disconcert.
Responded one social media user, ‘Wow! What a wicked thing to wish on more than half the country. She has no business teaching children. She needs to find a different job working with her own kind – snakes.’
Stated another, ‘She needs to be called to task for her hateful rhetoric. Teachers need to teach & refrain from religious & political discussion.’
While another wrote, ‘Parents need to call Colleyville Middle School and demand Lisa Grimes be fired immediately! This is unacceptable!’
Responding to growing fissure, the Grapevine-Colleyville school district issued a note to parents where they said Grimes’ statements don’t reflect the views of the school district or middle school.
School board president Jorge Rodriguez said in a statement sent by the school district that the board rejected Grimes’ statements and that it supported the decision to place her on administrative leave.
Remembering who you are suppose to be teaching
An update from the district Thursday afternoon said it is working to make sure there’s no disruption to students’ learning.
‘This incident should not overshadow the many heights that Colleyville Middle School students reach every day or the tireless work of teachers at Colleyville Middle School and across GCISD,’ an email statement from the school district read.
By the end of the day, Grimes had resigned her post at the school, herself unwittingly a political victim of the very politics she sought to defray, while perhaps failing to understand the moral imperative educators are held against by the parents of the children she teaches.
