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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Distressed students pointed the costume out to their principal, Joe Powers, but Powers explained to students the boy was dressed as a Communist-era East German soldier, Powers wrote Monday in a note to staff.

"I tried to explain the context and time period of the uniform to the students who spoke with me, but apparently the student who wore the uniform may have told people it was from the 1940s," Powers wrote.

A video of the male student goose stepping during a school Halloween parade — accompanied by a chorus of boos — has since made the rounds on social media.

On Thursday, in an email to parents, Powers acknowledged the situation should have been handled differently.

"As more information has come to light, including additional video of the incident and through conversations with our staff and students, we realize that this has greatly impacted our community and acknowledge that we should have handled the incident with greater care, and communicated more clearly with the school community about the nature of the incident," Powers said.

"Let me say clearly and plainly that what occurred caused harm to many of our students and staff who recognized this as an act of antisemitism. Let me also say clearly and plainly that intolerance, bigotry, and bias-based behaviors have no place in our school," Powers said.

Cassie Creswell, who has a child at Jones and is a former chair of the Local School Council, said Powers should have immediately made the student change out of the costume and called the student’s parents to have a serious discussion about the situation.

"I’m very concerned," Creswell said. "I have been tracking the rise in right-wing extremism in the suburbs for a while now, and this is a real thing, and it’s connection to actual physical violence is a real thing and to have the response from the school be what it was, it’s very disturbing."

Special support staff were scheduled to be at the school this week, and safe spaces would be made available "for students to process the harm they’ve experienced," Powers said in his email to parents.

This sounds like an onion article.

One the one hand, the student's parents were really dumb for letting him go to school dressed like this. On the other hand, the principal was really dumb for not realizing this was going to cause blowback, and not realizing that, since he was already embroiled in a dispute with the school board over him not being obsequiously leftist enough as per the article, this was going to be politically dangerous to him.

On one foot, Creswell sounds like she'd be fun at parties and probably gives out toothbrushes to kids on Halloween. On the other foot, I love that the principal was just autistically explaining to the students that this was a Communist soldier outfit, not a Nazi soldier outfit.

No, you haven't been harmed because a weird kid did a weird kid thing and you took offense to it. Grow up.

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