Superintendent: No record of complaints about pro-Antifa teacher before Project Veritas video

Gabriel Gipe appeared to run a veritable master class in left-wing radicalism at his Sacramento high school, but until Project Veritas exposed the social-studies teacher earlier this week, the district had no record of any complaints.

Chris Evans, Natomas Unified High School superintendent, said the investigation has so far failed to turn up any reports raising red flags about Mr. Gipe, whose classroom was festooned with leftist displays and slogans, including an Antifa flag and Chairman Mao poster.

Mr. Evans said he has heard that a parent and a student reached out to the district, but “we’ve checked our records and as of now we can’t find those complaints.”

“We can’t find them through our email system. We can’t find them through our constituent customer service office,” he told Project Veritas in an interview posted Thursday.

Still a mystery is how the unabashedly pro-Antifa, pro-communist teacher was able to get away with pushing an extreme political agenda during his three years at Inderkum High School in Sacramento.

Mr. Gipe boasted in the undercover video released Tuesday that he had “180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries,” but that parents of students in his AP government class left him alone.

“A lot of senior parents at this point have backed off,” Mr. Gipe said. “They’re just kind of like, well, you can fend for yourself.”

For students in the college-prep advanced government course, and perhaps their parents, one possibility is that concerns about grades made them reluctant to bring Mr. Gipe’s radical politics to the attention of school authorities.

Inside the Inderkum High School teacher’s politically charged classroom https://t.co/1YQbsu2Um5

— kcranews (@kcranews) September 3, 2021

Mr. Evans announced Wednesday that the teacher had been placed on paid leave while the district takes steps to fire him, citing violations of its policy on political activity and bias.

The superintendent said he spoke to Mr. Gipe, and “he came clean on almost everything: ‘I’m a communist, I’m a part of Antifa, and yes, I do teach it in my classroom.’”

Among the displays on his wall was a quad chart on which students were asked to place their photos to indicate their ideology, featuring a square with a swastika on the right and a hammer-and-sickle on the left.

“[He was] forcing students at the age of 17, maybe some 18, to publicly state what their ideology was,” Mr. Evans told KCRA-TV in Sacramento. “That’s completely inappropriate.”

Mr. Evans said he recently learned that Mr. Gipe had posted a political sign in 2018 in support of California’s Proposition 10, which would have expanded rent control, but that administrators apparently didn’t notice it or failed to realize it violated school rules.

“I suspect we have more professional development to do for administrators,” said Mr. Evans. “There’s a lot to learn and sometimes things will be missed. That clearly was. We’ve done nothing but own and apologize for that.”

Photos obtained by KCRA-TV from a parent whose child was enrolled in Mr. Gipe’s course showed classroom signs with messages such as “Education Not Deportation,” “Free Palestine,” “Trans Activist on Trial,” and “The Oceans Are Rising and So Are We.”

“He has his platform as the teacher to deliver his message and to say what he wants to say to the class, but when confronted about it in a private conversation, he retracts it,” the parent, who wished to remain anonymous, told the station. “Every student in that class got his message: If something doesn’t directly affect you, your opinion doesn’t (expletive) matter.”

The district plans to train staff to pay closer attention to posters and other displays, or “walk the walls with their eyes.”

“There was no one at the site that was aware that the class was as imbalanced and as biased as it was,” said Mr. Evans.

Mr. Evans asked Project Veritas for the entire unedited video, saying that it would “help us determine the scope of our next steps,” as well as any information about previous complaints, redacting the names if needed.

“I’m not here to find out who complained. That’s not here nor there,” he said. “I’m grateful in the end that the information came to us so we could take action.”