| Photo: CBS 5 News |
| This bumper sticker was enough to get a high school English teacher fired in Arizona. |
“Have you drugged your kid today?” That’s the bumper sticker that got an Arizona schoolteacher fired.
It was just one of 61 bumper stickers on high school English teacher Tarah Ausborn’s Toyota Prius, reports Judy Molland at Care2. But after the teacher refused to peel off the sticker after five parents at Imagine Prep High School complained and administrators ordered it — or her car — removed, she was fired.
School administrators told Ausborn she could keep the sticker on her vehicle if she’d promise to park off campus for the rest of the school year. But Ausborn stuck to her guns, and lost her job.
| Photo: Care2 |
| Here are some of the other stickers on fired teacher Tarah Ausburn’s Prius. |
”It’s kind of a criticism of us tending to over-medicate hyperactive kids who might not need those medications,” Ausborn told CBS 5 News. “I just like the ability to take a controversial topic and sum it up in one clever line.”
“I’m an English teacher; that’s what I do,” Ausburn said.
Ausburn is fighting to get her job back, maintaining that her First Amendment free speech rights are being violated. But Imagine Prep is a public charter school, meaning teachers there don’t have as many rights as teachers in “regular” public schools — nor, crucially, do they have a teachers’ union backing them up.
The teacher pointed out that she never imposed her political viewpoints on students in class. She left that up to the bumper stickers on her Prius, which is almost completely covered with stickers on liberal causes ranging from feminism to the environment.
When the story was posted online by CBS 5 News, it drew numerous comments, many of them from Ausburn’s former students, describing what an amazing teacher she was.
So now, it appears Big Pharma isn’t content just to squash their medical marijuana competitors at every opportunity. Now their authoritarian minions in local communities are squashing the pharmaceutical debate before it can even occur — or, heaven forbid, any young minds should be even indirectly exposed to independent, non-corporate thinking.