Earlier this year, Pennsylvania’s unaccountable, unelected School Reform Commission voted, basically in secret, to unilaterally tear up the contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.
This set off a massive backlash from teachers, parents, and students, who are already seeing their future get flushed down the toilet by the people running the District. Students staged walkouts on behalf of their teachers. Protests shut down Broad Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. One witness at the ensuing meeting of the SRC told me that by the end of the meeting, the commissioners looked like they’d come from a child’s funeral. Simms was given the opportunity to apologize, but declined. The chair joked that he’d enter a motion for the SRC to dissolve itself (which is, in fact the only way to get rid of them) but that he’d probably have a unanimous vote to do so.
Soon after this decision, SRC Commissioner Sylvia Simms decided to host a screening of Won’t Back Down, a critical flop of a movie that attacked teacher’s unions, at the School District headquarters. Several students made it into the screening, and held a loud protest, essentially shutting down the whole event. During the protest, Simms got caught on video berating the students, who alleged that the commissioner screamed “I’ll bet y’all go to failing schools. Y’all ought to be locked up!” The video went viral, and she wound up as Atrios’s Worst person in the World.
Sadly, you can’t hear her above the chants of the students, and Simms quickly denied the allegation saying, “It wasn’t like that…I’ve noticed we have a lot of failing schools. It’s my job to try to fix as many schools as I can.”
Well. Yesterday, new video surfaced:
So now it’s pretty clear that Simms (who represents herself on Twitter with an icon of Angela Davis with the logo “Power and Equality”) is not only an awful person who yells at children, but a liar and a coward as well. I’ll add “stupid” to that list of unsavory personal traits, since only a stupid person would do something like that in public and then lie about it. Everyone’s cell phone has a camera on it; the audio was bound to surface.
This is no small thing, in my opinion. This person is tasked with running our school district. What kind of example is Simms setting for the children she’s charged with educating?
The Worst Person in the World has just gotten Worse. If she won’t voluntarily step down, the Mayor -who appointed her- needs to force her resignation. Her credibility -already under question- is now thoroughly shot.