A Brighton Secondary College teacher says she feared a student who regularly called her racist in class, denying claims she taught her humanities class with political bias.
Demi Flessa told a Federal Court hearing that student Matt Kaplan appeared “hostile and aggressive” during the semester she taught him in 2018 and would call her a racist when she’d ask him to sit down and stop interrupting.
Flessa denied claims from the boy’s mother that she was anti-Semitic towards the Jewish student. Instead, she said Kaplan was “the ringleader” of disobedience in her class.
“Sometimes I’d walk into the class and already there’d be … a hullabaloo. It was noisy, [the students] were yelling, screaming at each other,” she said.
“Every time I’d ask him to sit down and be quiet, he’d accuse me of being racist. He was really inflammatory.
“I can’t remember all the words, but I remember feeling the fear.”
Kaplan is among five former students – including brother Joel Kaplan, Liam Arnold-Levy, Guy Cohen and Zack Snelling – who are suing the government-run school and the state of Victoria for negligence and failing to protect them as Jewish students under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act.
School principal Richard Minack and teachers Paul Varney and Flessa are all named in the lawsuit.
Read the article by Erin Pearson in WAToday.