Teacher harassment in Malvern, Pennsylvania, grabbed national headlines earlier this year. But what happened there is hardly an isolated incident.
At our Philadelphia school, situated about 30 minutes from suburban Malvern, my fellow teachers and I have daily mental health check-ins with each other. We console each other in supply closets. For years, I have given out therapists’ contact information. I have written about the safe workspace that my colleagues and I need but don’t have.
What brought this issue to the fore is a New York Times article about Malvern’s Great Valley Middle School, where teachers were alarmed to find students impersonating them on TikTok. Over 20 accounts were created to depict teachers using “pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia, and made-up sexual hookups among teachers.” The article called the Malvern case the first of its kind and “a significant escalation in how middle and high school students impersonate, troll and harass educators on social media.” But really, it is nothing more than the public documentation of a years-long problem that plagues educators online and off. Behind the headlines, teachers are regularly harassed and even assaulted.
The superintendent in Malvern said that some students’ actions were protected by free speech. He said the district did what it could but that student privacy prevented him from discussing disciplinary actions taken. Very often, however, students who engage in this type of behavior are not held accountable…