A high school teacher in Georgia has been placed on administrative leave after a Facebook video was released in which the teacher threatens a student with gun violence.
“Don’t smile at me, man. That’s how people like you get shot,” said Paul Hagan, a physics and electronics teacher at Rockdale Career Academy in Conyers, Georgia, about 25 miles southeast of Atlanta.
Conyers started walking away from the 17-year-old black student before adding: “I got a bet. I bet by the time you’re 21, somebody’s going to put a bullet right through your head. OK? And I might be the one who does it.”
April Carr, the mother of the student to whom the science department chair was speaking, shared the video on social media.
“He is talking to my son in this video. I am outraged. . . . I will not stop until he is removed from teaching and held accountable,” Carr wrote on Facebook.
Carr told WSB-TV in Atlanta that the assistant principal called her to tell her someone used inappropriate language with her son.
Carr explained that her son and some other students were laughing while Hagan wrote on the chalkboard when the teacher turned and spoke, presumably, to her son.
“I think it’s a terroristic threat on my son’s life that I definitely don’t take lightly,” Carr told the TV station. “I want [Hagan] fired. And I want him fired and I want charges pressed against him.”
Carr filed a police report with the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office, which labeled the incident “miscellaneous.”
Hagan, a teacher at the school since 2010, has since apologized to Carr’s son, The Washington Post reported.
Rockdale Career Academy is a non-traditional school for children who have difficulties learning and might need alternative teaching methods.
“By nontraditional, we mean that it is not a home high school for any students,” Cindy Ball, a spokeswoman for the district, told The Washington Post. “Students in grades 9-12 from across the district come to this school from their home schools to participate in classes.”
