A year after a transgender man fatally shot six people, including three students under age 10, at a Christian school in Nashville, authorities in Massachusetts uncovered a transgender student’s “hit list” of 40 potential victims at a middle school near Boston.
This being Massachusetts, school officials responded as we might expect.
The Daily Mail reported this week that the conservative group Parents Defending Education obtained staff emails from Watertown Middle School about the incident through a public records request.
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The hit list was discovered in late January after a teacher overheard students at the middle school talking about who was on it. The possible perp, who was not identified, had created a list simply called “hit list.”
Police were alerted and the student was interviewed. Investigators believed “the youngster did not have access to weapons, and that there was ‘no credible threat’ to safety at the 560-student school,” Daily Mail noted.
School district Superintendent Deanne Galdston reportedly claimed that the would-be assailant was “expressing their frustration on paper” and had not planned for a violent attack.
Accordingly, the school declined to expel the student and iInstead argued for “’empathy for the creator” of the list, as well as anti-bias training and the “urgent” creation of an “LGBTQIA+ affinity group,” the Daily Mail reported.
In response to the discovery of the list, school Principal Jennifer Chen Fein argued for tackling “anti-trans and other biased behavior” in class.
School Committee member Lily Rayman-Read sent emails calling for “empathy for the creator” of the list and the “immediate creation of an affinity space for LGBTQIA+ families.”
That act would help students “across all spectrums” feel “safe” at school, Rayman-Read added.
Casey Ryan, the PDE researcher who acquired the emails, told the Daily Mail, “Parents deserve to know why their kids were targeted and potentially at risk of losing their lives. The district placed a higher priority on the transgender student’s comfort than the safety of 40 other individuals.”
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