Sophia DeLoretto-Chudy fired: Austin ISD teacher at Becker Elementary School forced out over release of TikTok video letting third graders sit during the Pledge of Allegiance.
Little love lost. A Texas third-grade teacher who posted a viral TikTok video earlier this year about her students sitting in protest during the Pledge of Allegiance has been fired.
Sophia DeLoretto-Chudy posted the video in March in which she stated Austin Independent School District (Austin ISD) administrators ‘raising concerns’ with her after children had linked her lesson about Nazi propaganda to the Pledge.
The former Becker Elementary School teacher in the viral TikTok video said she’d been pulled into a ‘check-in meeting’ with administrators. The firing comes during the educator’s first year teaching elementary class, FOX7 reported.
A case of using social media against school policy?
DeLoretto-Chudy said that the school district was concerned that she was teaching students their ‘legal and constitutional rights’.
She explained in a video posted the same day that her students had made the decision to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance by themselves after teaching a lesson about how Adolf Hitler had tried to brainwash German children during Holocaust Remembrance Week.
She said she had a conversation with the third grade students about the Civil War origins of the Pledge, after which they chose not to stand at a school assembly.
School children began reciting the Pledge as a ‘daily patriotic ritual’ in 1892, according to the National Museum of American History.
DeLoretto-Chudy said she also taught the children about Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who was dropped by the San Francisco 49ers after kneeling during the national anthem.
The district’s employee handbook bans employees from using social media to interfere with their job.
Define interfere? Define education? Define political indoctrination?
@sophforpresident you’d think I was teaching way out west but this is downtown Austin… #TeachingTexas ♬ original sound – Sophie Marie
‘In Texas it’s a crime to question the pledge of allegiance,’
Following the student protest, DeLoretto-Chudy was called in by a school official where she believed she would be offered help after a ‘rough first year’.
It wasn’t anything but according to the educator.
‘They brought me a list of concerns. I was a little taken aback,’ the teacher who worked with eight-year-olds told FOX7. ‘It caused me to have quite a bit of anxiety.’
Austin ISD administrators sat down with the educator, telling her, ‘In Texas it’s a crime to question the pledge of allegiance,’
DeLoretto-Chudy was also confronted with a long list of complaints about her job performance, including doing a book study on Harry Potter and her failure to answer emails in a timely manner along with her work attire.
DeLoretto-Chudy told CBS Austin she was placed on administrative leave after being told her TikTok was ‘causing a lot of disruptions’.
She told the news outlet she had been recently informed she was being fired.
Under Texas law, state teachers are required to provide lessons about the Holocaust during the annual remembrance week.
DeLoretto-Chudy, who previously ran as a Democrat for the California state legislature, is a prolific poster on TikTok on issues from abortion to voting rights.
