Liberal Superintendent Skips Hearing on Sexual Misconduct of Educators in Wisconsin

When it comes to child sex abuse, the leftists in public offices seem to either actively enable it or simply don’t care. In Wisconsin, this issue has sparked quite some fury on the right, and rightfully so. This comes as Jill Underly, elected Democrat serving as the superintendent of public instruction in Wisconsin, has turned the state’s schools into safe havens for child predators.

The Federalist (October 27) called Underly “a teacher’s union stooge steeped in left-wing dogma” who presided one of the most abhorrent and alarming scandals involving educator licensing for schools in the state. The scandal surfaced out of an investigation revealing that more than 200 educators were allowed to keep their licenses and thus continue to be around children despite sexually approaching minor students as recorded in complaints against them.

Praising Cap Times, a left-leaning newspaper based out of Madison, for its year-long investigation into the scandal, the story wrote:

It’s all shocking but not surprising in a public school system long run by superintendents backed and bankrolled by the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), its powerful partners in Milwaukee and Madison, and union allies.

Citing a 2023 report from The Wisconsin Daily Star, the story noted that liberal-led school districts across Wisconsin have encouraged students to get on TrevorSpace, a social-networking website that has received a lot of criticism for putting minors at the risk of sexual exploitation as adults can easily engage in sexual conversations with minors on the site.

But all this didn’t bother Jill Underly, who was and continues to be part of the problem. On the contrary, she rubbed some salt into the wounds of concerned parents and victims of child sex abuse by skipping a recent hearing on the issue. The hearing, conducted by a State Senate committee last Thursday, invited Underly to testify and answer questions regarding the sexual misconduct scandal implicating educators. She chose not to show up and instead went to an award ceremony.

Republican lawmaker Amanda Nedweski of the Wisconsin State Assembly called Underly’s absence at the hearing “dereliction of duty.” Republican Congressman Bryan Steil of WI called out Underly’s skipping of the hearing as disgraceful.

In the face of such reprehensible complicity and neglect of the leftist leadership in Wisconsin’s schools system, leftists didn’t sit back and duck their heads in shame. Some of them tried to shift part of the blame to the Republicans by disregarding their fury over the issue as not helpful. In her commentary on the topic in Wisconsin Examiner (October 25), Editor-in-chief Ruth Conniff blamed former Governor Scott Walker – a Republican – for destroying trust in teachers and public schools by his hostile policies toward teachers. She wrote:

But the defunding of Wisconsin public schools that began under Walker and continues today is directly tied to the decline in quality. It’s not laziness or pedophilia that plague our school system. It’s deliberate neglect.