Former Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Gillum apparently thinks that the traumatization of a 6-year-old child is the perfect weapon in his continued fight against charter school and educational freedom. He discovered that Kaia Rolle was taken in handcuffs from a charter school and reflexively and ran with it on Twitter because he isn’t particularly fond of charter schools.
But he forgot about Nadia King, the other 6-year-old girl in his state who was taken out of school by police just a couple weeks ago? Her story is a bit different than Kaia’s in that she was not arrested but was instead taken from school by police and involuntarily admitted to a mental health facility without her mother’s consent. She was held there for 48 hours and allegedly injected with the anti-psychotic drug, Thorazine. Her family was not permitted to see during her stay.
Nadia attends a traditional public school, the kind that Andrew Gillum approves of and seem to assume is free from these inexcusable incidents. His bias helps no one. Bad things happen to children in all kinds of schools and that won’t change until people like Andrew Gillum start being honest and stop carrying water for one kind of school.
Andrew Gillum lost his race for governor in 2018, at least in part, because of his unwillingness to support charter schools and school choice. He took for granted that black mothers would vote for him over Ron DeSantis, regardless of his education platform. He was wrong.
If there is one lesson from what happened to Kaia and Nadia, it is that no parent should ever feel like their only option is a school that literally terrorized their 6-year-old child.
I hope Mr. Gillum would agree.