Erica DeVoe was sad about not being able to make TikToks with her students anymore. Following multiple complaints from parents about DeVoe, a Rhode Island middle school teacher, and her frequent social media activity featuring young students, Westerly Middle School changed its policy and barred the practice.
In response, DeVoe took to Tiktok. Naturally.
In a strange, minute-long video posted in May that has now been viewed by hundreds of thousands, DeVoe, who is young and telegenic, speaks with soft and measured self-possession, more like a corporate therapist leading a retreat than a middle school teacher, as she tells students how much fun it was to make TikToks and how she hopes they’ll be able to make TikToks together again someday. Her repetition of the word “TikTok” is hypnotic and mirrors the addictive quality of the app itself.
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At this point, one might dismiss DeVoe as an eccentric who enjoyed connecting with students through silly dances and playacting. While not a harmless mistake, disseminating videos of children online without permission has the potential for real danger, it is forgivable. After all, standards regarding technology in schools are in constant flux, and school policies often lag behind the latest innovations and trends.
But then, the video gets weird. DeVoe shifts her attention to “the parents who feel it necessary to complain to the school about [her] TikToks.” Her tone grows stern and her playful smile vanishes. “I’m not apologizing,” she says. “I just hope you realize that I don’t make the TikToks for you. I make the TikToks for and with the kids because it’s fun.”
DeVoe then turns her attention back to the students before signing off.
“Kids,” she begins in an overeager tone that just feels off, “I hope we can have fun again sometime soon.”
The video repeats on a loop while the theme music for HBO’s hyperexplicit teenage drama Euphoria lingers in the background.
As of today, DeVoe remains employed by Westerly Middle School. According to Superintendent Mark Garceau, the matter was handled “privately.” She still posts weekly TikToks that are directed at her students, many of whom follow her account and comment on her videos. No further information has been made public.
The issue might not have even become a controversy had DeVoe not defiantly targeted parents who had simply expressed concerns about their children’s privacy. But because of her odd nonapology, the controversy continues, with a vocal contingent of parents still incensed by her behavior and the school’s inaction.
And this is just one scandal among many that Westerly Public Schools has dealt with in recent months. Others include a contentious school committee meeting that featured a standoff between parents and teachers over the availability of graphic novels that feature illustrated sex scenes in the school library. And most recently, a controversial school committee vote awarded a Boston-based firm the contract to perform an “equity audit” to the tune of $65,000, which struck many as a frivolous expenditure for an underperforming school district. (Westerly Public Schools has seen rapidly declining scores in nearly every category in the Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System in recent years).
The situation in Westerly is a microcosm of the discord that plagues school communities across America and is reminiscent of the turmoil that catapulted Loudoun County, Virginia, into national attention during the summer of 2021. Its three concurrent controversies — DeVoe’s open disrespect toward the parents of her students, the ready availability of sexually explicit materials in the school library, and the district’s purchase of an expensive “equity audit” during a sustained decline in student achievement — underscore a deep cultural chasm. Gone are the days when school committee meetings focused on the amount of homework students receive or the cost of baseball uniforms.
None of this, however, should come as a surprise. The stated project of American leftism has long been to disintegrate traditional norms and roles in order to cultivate a society of self-invention and moral relativism. From French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre’s contention that existence precedes essence, thereby rendering “roles” such as man and woman, father and mother as social constructs with no basis in biology or cultural utility, and through French philosopher Michel Foucault’s contention that morality is but a malleable construct of the powerful, the Left’s most influential thinkers of the past century have called for exactly the type of social unrest playing out in school board meetings nationwide. The seeds were planted methodically in the halls of academia over multiple generations. We are witnessing the fruits.
In recent years, a critical mass of teachers trained in these doctrines by an overwhelmingly leftist professoriate (which was hired and awarded tenure by an overwhelmingly leftist administrative complex), entered classrooms across America, bringing the revolution home to us all. “To the question: ‘Where did all the sixties radicals go?’” Paul Buhle wrote in his 1991 classic Marxism in the United States, “the most accurate answer would be: neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom.”
And once there, the first order of business — which they’ve proclaimed loudly, repeatedly, and in plain English — has been to “disrupt” and “dismantle” the existing order of society by teaching students to eschew, and even abhor, traditional values and roles.
To be certain, schools like Westerly High School refuse to remove books that contain illustrated depictions of oral sex between minors — such as the scenes portrayed in Gender Queer — because they believe themselves to be the final arbiters of moral instruction for children, not parents.
They think it’s healthy for children to ingest sexually explicit materials, and they don’t care what you think.
They consider traditional American culture irredeemable. Its moral defects are “structural” and “systemic.” Therefore, the only way to form a just society is to “smash” the existing substructures.
Of course, they’ve been saying this for decades now. We’ve only recently begun to listen. They don’t want to improve upon what already exists. They want to tear it all down.
DeVoe’s performance on TikTok is exemplary in these terms because it serves to “disrupt” the traditional notion that the family takes precedence and that parents ought to be respected as the primary caretakers and final authority. Instead, as an MSNBC ad accidentally let slip, her behavior suggests that children belong primarily to the community. DeVoe, a trusted adult in a position of authority, publicly inserted herself between parent and child and brazenly modeled defiance against parental authority.
It would be difficult to imagine a more destructive example to set at this stage in children’s development. This makes her lack of public punishment even worse. To be sure, her students noticed that, too.
It’s impossible to quantify the damage this incident has already wrought in the homes of Westerly. Prepubescent children are nothing if not impressionable and susceptible to unintentional mimicry. If a beloved teacher like Ms. DeVoe can openly flout the authority of their parents, why can’t they?
But perhaps that’s the point.
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Peter Laffin is a writer in New England. Follow him on Twitter at @Laffin_Out_Loud.
