Whistleblower Providence (RI) Teacher Ramona Bessinger Under Attack Again, Teachers Helping Organize Student Protest Against Her
Bessinger targeted for a protest on September 30, organized by Classical High School students Bessinger asserts are “lead by activist mob teachers” with instructions for students to cover their faces to avoid identification.
Ramona Bessinger was the Providence, Rhode Island, middle school teacher who blew the whistle on the destructive racialized new curriculum, and then went public about the retaliation that followed, all in posts by her at Legal Insurrection:
- I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School (July 13, 2021)
- Ramona Bessinger: I’m A Middle School Teacher Facing Retaliation After Blowing The Whistle On Critical Race Curriculum (October 3, 2021)
We covered the harassment and physical intimidation against her at the middle school, including hostility from other teachers:
- Harassment Of Providence Anti-Critical Race Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Intensified
- Providence Anti-Critical Race Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Taunted In Troubling Schoolyard Incident
- Providence Anti-CRT Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Hit With Suspension And Transfer
After her involuntary transfer to Classical High School, the premier Providence public high school in the system that is rated the best in the state, Bessinger endured isolation as she awaited whether she would get permanent teaching slot.
This summer, Bessinger seemed to emerge victorious, Victory – I’m A Teacher Who Blew The Whistle On CRT In Schools, Suffered Retaliation, But Now I’ve Prevailed:
I have received notification that coming this fall, I will have a permanent classroom assignment at Classical High. I have been freed from the basement. I’ll be back in the classroom this September sharing literature about the Holocaust, American authors with universal messages to share, historical references and literature that reflects the greatness of America in all her flaws and perfection. I’ll teach universal themes that all children can relate to, my classroom will have characters and poetry free of harmful political activism and full of accuracy. I hope to instill critical thinking, freedom of thought, rigorous activities that promote lively discussion unprompted by curriculum materials filled with propaganda.
It would have been so easy to throw in the towel and step out into the fresh air and sunlight, and leave all that nonsense behind for good. But I persevered with a great deal more that lies ahead.
Now, I can continue to teach children the truth about this great nation and perhaps contribute to the restoration of a politically neutral zone for all children K-12.
Bessinger was right that “a great deal more… lies ahead.” Apparently some within the Providence School system are not ready to move on and leave Bessinger alone.
We have just learned that Bessinger’s problems are not over. Some students at Classical are organizing a walk-out and protest against her, aided she has learned by teachers at Classical and her former middle school. Bessinger has provided the names of those teachers to her principal and other administrators and teachers union officials, asking whether it was appropriate for teachers to be organizing students against another teacher.
Here is the protest poster being circulated, which Bessinger believes may have received assistance from a teacher in creating:
More worrisome to Bessinger is that the student group has posted on social media instructions for students to cover their faces so they cannot be identified, and has increased the rhetoric against her that increases the possible physical danger to her.
The student group lists itself on Instagram as a “Collective of Classical students committed to making Classical a safe school for queer and trans students.” It has a list of demands linked unrelated to Bessinger, focusing on “Bathroom Equity” and “Pronouns and Chosen Name Usage By Teachers” requiring teachers use such terminology chosen by students.
Bessinger provided the following statement:
“It appears my students are being lead by activist mob teachers who tell them I am racist and transphobic. Of course nothing of the sort is true. I care deeply for all my students, and respect their individual rights, and beliefs. This is a targeted attack by the crazy 10 % woke mob that influence children using fear and bullying techniques.”
We reached out to Providence Public Schools for comment, but as of this writing have not yet received a response.
This is a developing story, and more details will be provided as they become available.
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Comments
Facial recognition doesn’t matter. Only one person with a camera and audio. All it takes is one person to say a name, and natural response will kick in, turning to the person calling their name.
Facial recognition doesn’t matter it doesn’t work on blacks
Can’t they just make a list of every student absent from class without a legitimate excuse?
With the face masks, I would say this is pantifa training.
This is the worst kind of fascist* bullying. Mobilizing a school against a single person is horrific, and all of those students will have to be de-programmed before they should be allowed to participate in our republic.
(* Yes, I am using fascist un-ironically, and literally.)
This will continue until we put a stop to it
Blow the whole education complex up and start over from scratch.
“We”?
Do you reside in this voting district?
They are making CRT universal, so the response should be in kind.
“We” means all parents who are tired of the BS liberals get away with. My father would have dusted my britches if I ever disrespected a teacher in this manner. I had a teacher in high school in 1980 who was a Carter supporter ( this was Georgia, BTW) claiming Reagan was a fascist, and would surely try to overturn Roe v Wade at the earliest opportunity, using profane language while doing so, Sound familiar? The teacher was looking for a new job the next year after my father and many other parents went to the school board meeting and confronted them about it. Now days, Pops would be called a domestic terror threat. Then he was just a parent exercising his First Amendment rights. They should suspend every child not at school that day. One of them will talk. Arrest anyone wearing a mask designed to hide their identity. Suspend all teachers found to be supporting this. It is workplace harassment. These children need to disciplined. Their parents need to ground them, take away the electronic toys, and give them a damn book to read, preferably something by Thomas Sowell. When they took corporal punishment out of schools is when this started. These brats have no fear. Fear is an excellent motivator when applied judiciously.
Phoning it in? Papering that file?
Oberlin has taught them nothing.
“Oberlin? That’s a city in Germany, right??”
Kind of. It’s the Irish neighborhood in that city.
Grooming future brown shirts.
Future IRS Agents.
In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.” To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful).
Today’s fascists call themselves “anti-fascists.” Just like the Nazis, they are totalitarian: they are determined not to allow their opponents to murmur the slightest whisper of dissent. Forcibly suppressing the speech of someone with whom one disagrees is a quintessentially fascist act.
In 1978 Oberlin professor Bob Neil, in his “Germany Since 1914” history class, ranted against the behavior of people in pre-WWII Germany. And yet, only 40 years later, that behavior would reappear in Oberlin College students. But, but, but, we put “anti” in front of our name, and that makes us completely different from them.
actually the teacher herself is a leftist, but doesn’t see it – teaching a class in the “universal” aspects of American literature..
Psychologically the mind and physiologically the body cannot not do what it has not done. Telling someone not to climb the fence requires that they understanding “climbing the fence.” The same is true with the “anti-facists.” You have to be one (fascist) in order to not be one (anti-fascist).
And today’s Italian definition of a fascist has changed to reflect the hierarchy of god, family and country above the communally worshiped paradigm of government as the creator of our “rights.” So per Italy’s new expression of god, family and country, I’m a fascist, and frankly proud of it.
More like Chinese cultural revolutionary Red Guards. It’s just a matter of ‘when’ they start physically attacking and killing teachers in service to their ideologies.
Isn’t that poster slanderous?
It very well could meet the bar, I was thinking that myself.
I would like to see a case filed.
No, it isn’t. The statement that Bessinger and other unnamed teachers “continue to be racist” is a statement of opinion, not of fact, and therefore can’t be defamatory. Ditto for the statements that they are “not safe” and “need to be fired”. The statement that PPSD is “protecting” them is a factual statement, but it’s not defamatory, and in any event is about PPSD, not the teachers.
A good argument for abolishing public schools, although even some private schools do not seem to be immune to this nonsense.
“good argument for abolishing public schools”
They can’t be “abolished,” per se. They’re gonna have to collapse when a critical mass of parents withdraw their children.
Hence the primary reason they fear school choice.
“good argument for abolishing public schools”
No, but it’s an excellent argument for abolishing teachers’ unions.
what I keep saying – the only solution is for parents to withdraw their children en masse from government schools.
Agreed.
Sure they can be abolished. They’re not going to be, but they can and should be.
“asking whether it was appropriate for teachers to be organizing students against another teacher”
File this one under No Brainer.
Yet count on administrators equivocating.
Parents need to fire the teachers involved in this terrorism, principal, and superintendent, at the very least.
Is wearing a mask for the purpose of committing a crime (terrorism) also a crime, in RI? These are modern-day Klansmen, and this behavior is illegal in some States.
As noted above, pantifa grooming.
This is the typical game plan. The leftist activists enlist the help of clueless student fools. This makes it impossible to get rid of the leftist activists. The only thing the administrators can do is shut down the school – which they will not. The only thing sane parents or teachers can do is find an alternative school.
Maybe it will be possible to organize supporters of Bessinger to show up as well.
Lee Plakas. Paging Lee Plakas to the white (racist?) courtesy phone. 😉
Evil never rests
Never
And they work incrementally.
Victory is for a moment. When you win, you get to play again at a higher level. Just like the bakery vs. Oberlin, they won, but they’re public figures now. Rittenhouse. Sandman.
So, now the game is promoting her syllabus, reviews of actual class content, testimonials, and follow-on results. And continuous monitoring, and audit of how she’s treated, and what’s going on around her.
We have a couple generations of people who were raised to believe that activism for its own sake is an absolute good.
They will not stop protesting, demonstrating, terrorizing because they believe it makes them better than the rest of us.
Good luck to a brave teacher.
And they are infantile enough to believe they are always right, and ignorant enough to ensure they never are.
To the detriment of every socialist/communist society.
‘We have a couple generations of people who were raised to believe that activism for its own sake is an absolute good.”
Oh, I was having a variation of this argument with a non-profit “volunteer” just an hour ago, talking city-scale development plans and programs.
Trying something to solve a problem that makes the problem worse doesn’t count as progress. Trying something that does nothing for the problem is nearly as bad: burns resources, steals attentions, creates constituencies for the overhead, and discredits trying to fix the problem.
My conversation partner was an attentive and engaged person. She got to “working yourself out of a job” on her own. If your job is fixing something, you’ll know you’ve succeeded when you’re no longer needed for that.
Oddly, nobody in the do-gooding business seems to aim for working themselves out of a job as a goal.
It’s like they get some other payoff…
The last organization that recognized that its success meant it was no longer needed was the Anti Corn Law League. It dissolved itself, and basically became the Liberal Party.
The March of Dimes should have declared victory and dissolved itself, but instead adopted a new goal, one that’s open-ended enough that it will never be complete.
When I was on my high school math team, Classical had the only team that concerned us competitively. They were the team we had to beat to win.
I’m sorry to hear that in 55 years, they’ve devolved to this level of stupidity.
Apparently they haven’t learned deductive reasoning considering they are organizing a “walkout”…not hard to figure out who leaves or never shows up for class.
Presuming the administration wants to….
How did people get so stupid so fast? Seems like overnight the country imploded with no warning.
Or not. If you’re familiar with “How to Boil a Frog,” you’ll understand how this all happened.
It sounds like Providence Public Schools wants to walk down the same path as Oberlin. They should allow those people into the room, and then pull their masks down while recording them. That should be followed by expulsions and termination of any employees who are involved.
That would send a very clear zero tolerance message.
These are stormtroopers not students snd should be treated as such
No need to magnify the difficulty of a solution more than necessary. ‘A fish rots from its head’ is the applicable saw here. Begin by firing the superintendent (if elected, start a massive campaign against his/her re-election.) Begin a movement to fire a few administrators. They don’t teach anyway, so less than no loss to the school district. The firing effort doesn’t even have to be successful. Suddenly, I’m sure that you would be able to hear a pin drop in the vicinity of their offices. These people are not mostly dedicated Marxists. They are cowards, easily bullied by a mob, and able to rationalize their cowardice by relating it to the Zeitgeist or whatever. As soon as their own livelihoods are put at risk, they should begin to re-think their support for woke mobs such as these.
I suppose it would be rather difficult for the woke mob to understand the Hegelian dialectic that is soon to come for them and unleash a storm they are unlikely to survive.