Katie McDivitt, mugshot by Walton County Sheriff’s Office, and is a public record. Image via the New York Post.
Creepy softball coach groomed teen player, even after mom tried to intervene: cops
By David DeTurris | Tuesday, October 20, 2026 | 3:49 AM EDT
A Georgia teacher allegedly groomed a 15-year-old girl whose softball team she coached, and continued preying on the minor even after the teen’s mother tried to intervene, according to a warrant. Continue reading
If this had been done by the Trump Administration, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and far-left columnist Will Bunch would be screaming for a Special Persecutor Prosecutor to throw everyone in jail, but the Opinion section of the newspaper has nothing at all about this:
Students who moved out of the country were put back on Philly schools’ rolls
The reenrollment came just before an important funding deadline, as the district was grappling with lower-than-projected enrollment citywide.
Remember the Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Hoax of 2006? A stripper by the name of Crystal Gail Mangum accused three members of the university’s lacrosse team of raping her after a party for which she had been hired?
In the end, it was proven that the three young men accused were not just not guilty, but factually innocent, but not until after huge publicity, condemnation of the accused by a large group of faculty members, and, of course, the very lovely Amanda Marcotte adding her 2¢ many times.
Well, we’re seeing something similar at Cornell, and the public relations assaults by the activists have begun. I will admit it: I checked Miss Marcotte’s Salon postings, but it seems that she learned something from the rotten egg on her face twenty years ago: she hasn’t weighed in on this case, at least not yet. Continue reading
The important paragraph was the seventeenth one down.
What my sadly late best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal gave readers this September 11th morning was a glowing story on Fayette County Public Schools interim Superintendent Bill Bradford, complete with a great photo of the man, as seen in the newspaper’s tweet about the story shown to the right, handsome, broad-shouldered, looking like he came to the schools from the Police Department. The article told us all the good that he would do, and very little that he had actually done. I suppose that’s not much of a surprise.
Here’s that seventeenth paragraph: Continue reading
There’s a popular internet meme that we used to think a lack of information made people stupid, but nope, it wasn’t that!
Public school teachers are supposed to be educated, with at least a baccalaureate degree, and frequently an expectation that you must work on your master’s. From the case of Mary Kay Letourneau in the 1990s until now, teachers are taught about and warned against sexual contact, any sexual contact, including just flirting, with students. Most states have laws which hold teachers accountable for sexual contact with students, even those who have reached the age of sexual consent, due to the positions of authority teachers are presumed to hold over students. Yet we keep getting the stories over and over and over again:
Perv substitute teacher sent 14-year-old naked snaps every time she showered: ‘God, I want you so bad’
I used to think that political liberalism encompassed some divergence of views. After all, they can’t all think exactly the same on everything, right? But the more I read the more I see a mental monolith, and it’s a monolith that verges on stupidity.
The Trump administration is investigating Smith College for admitting trans women. Could Bryn Mawr be next?
Bryn Mawr College, like Smith, accepts all individuals who identify as women. The Trump administration says that violates federal discrimination laws, but has not yet gone after Bryn Mawr.
by Susan Snyder | Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo 2026 | 4:52 PM EDT
President Donald Trump’s administration this week opened an investigation into Smith College, one of the oldest women’s colleges in the country, for admitting transgender women.
Both Bryn Mawr College and Moore College of Art & Design — women’s colleges in the Philadelphia area — also admit trans women, opening up questions about whether they could be among the next targets, though Moore already is weighing whether to go coed.
“The college remains focused on our mission and commitment to academic excellence,” Bryn Mawr said in a statement. “We continue to operate in compliance with all federal laws and regulations.”
Full disclosure: I did some concrete work at Bryn Mawr College, in 2004, though it was between semesters, with few people on campus.
Further down:
The 1,370-student Bryn Mawr on its website notes that it accepts all individuals who identify as women, including cisgender and trans women. The school also accepts “intersex people who do not identify as male, individuals assigned female at birth who have not taken medical or legal steps to identify as male, and individuals assigned female at birth who do not identify within the gender binary.”
Bryn Mawr clarified its enrollment practices regarding transgender women in 2015, noting that the school would accept transgender women and “intersex individuals who live and identify as women at the time of application.”
Does that mean Bryn Mawr would have to retain individuals who identified as women at the time of application, but who later decided that they were really men? 🙂
Personally, I do not see the legal issue, unless there are males who applied and were denied because they are male; such men might have a potential discrimination complaint.
I could see a potential privacy issue, as was the case with Brayden Fleming, the male volleyball player calling himself “Blaire” and pretending to be a woman to play on the San José State women’s volleyball team, and who could “pass” well enough that both his teammates and opposing teams did not know he is male. His road trip roommate didn’t realize that he was male. But if Smith and Bryn Mawr colleges were open, and informed other students that a particular student was actually male, giving the other students the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they wished to share a locker room or restroom with the transgender student, it’s difficult to see a legal problem.
Then again, we know how that would work out: any student who decided that no, she did not want to share a bathroom or locker room with a male student would herself be accused of transphobia, and disciplined, possibly to the extent of expulsion. Any student who protested the inclusion of men males in women’s only spaces would face all sorts of problems in Bryn Mawr, because the far-left leadership have decided, against all rationality and all science that boys really can be girls, and that it’s hateful to dispute that cockamamie notion.
So, the colleges have created their own problems, but had they decided that only real women could be admitted, they’d have faced problems under the previous Administration. Common sense and lawfare tend to be two diametrically opposed things.
A viral video on TikTok made its way to Twitter as well, one in which a student at Preparatory Charter High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia asked some of his classmates to read a sentence, and several struggled. One of the sentences was, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche,” an odd bit of wording to be sure, but one which any high school student should be able to get through. “Silhouette” might have fooled some people, the “h” being mostly silent, though providing a clue to pronunciation anyway, and “gauche” is an uncommon word, though I have used it thrice on Twitter. But many were also tripped up by “extraordinary,” a very common word.
The videos were entitled, “Can you read?”, and it was obvious that several of the students actually could not read, at least not at anything close to grade level. So naturally the school had to respond and defend itself. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Philly charter school says student’s viral ‘Can You Read?’ video was ‘misleading and unfair’
One video of Preparatory Charter High School students was viewed more than 15 million times on TikTok.
by Maddie Hanna | Sunday, May 3, 2026 |6:27 PM EDT
A South Philadelphia charter school said Sunday that a student’s widely viewed videos showing classmates struggling to read certain words did not accurately reflect the school’s community.
Preparatory Charter High School, which enrolls students in grades 9 through 12, also said it was not seeking to expel the student who made the videos, contrary to posts circulating on social media.
Well, of course the school said that!
The account that posted the video, @whatthevek, did not respond to an interview request Sunday. The account last week also posted a “Can You Read Pt. 2″ video that was viewed more than 2 million times on TikTok, depicting students reading the sentence: “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.”
The footage drew media attention, and widely circulated social media posts claimed that the student who made the videos was facing expulsion.
On Sunday, Prep Charter’s administration said in a statement that while federal privacy rules barred the school from discussing details of disciplinary action, “the student in question is not facing expulsion.”
The school said the video footage “does not accurately reflect our school community or the values we strive to uphold every day.”
“While some students may have agreed to be filmed, the way the footage was presented lacks important context and has led to a portrayal that is misleading and unfair,” the school said in the statement. “The video titled ‘Can You Read?’ does not represent the character, effort, or abilities of our students as a whole.”
It doesn’t? Here’s education reporter Maddie Hanna’s final paragraph:
On Pennsylvania state assessments in the 2024-25 school year, 46.5% of students scored proficient in English language arts, compared with nearly 50% statewide.
That’s actually worse than the US News and World Report rankings, which had students there scoring 56% at grade level proficiency in reading. The trouble is that the Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers had only 21% grade level proficient in mathematics and 18% grade level proficient in science, yet the school has a graduation rate of 95%.
Perhaps someone smarter than me can tell me how that math works out? How does a high school which supposedly focuses on math and science graduate 95% of its students when roughly 80% of its students are not grade level proficient in math and science? What is a diploma from Prep Charter actually worth?
The interesting thing is that the unnamed @whatthevek was making a video on the school’s strongest performing area. What would have happened if he had been asking math of science questions?
He also posted a video entitled, “Are you Smarter than a 5th grader?”
Yes, I’m old, but I’m pretty sure that all of the 78 members of the Mt Sterling High School Class graduating Class of 1971 could actually read. They didn’t all take algebra or trig — I did — but no one would ever think of really asking them if they could read. And we had exactly one teacher who had his Master’s degree. Perhaps there’s something just plain wrong with public education today?
There was no one more disappointed than I was when The Philadelphia Inquirer and then-Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams started going after the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for covering up sexual abuses by Catholic priests, or the horrible statistics when the John Jay Report, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002 was released. Priests should be above the sexual abuse, and sometimes outright rape, that was documented.
Alas! it seems that (supposedly) celibate priests have not been the only ones engaging in the sexual abuse of minors. The arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 exposed a whole other world of adult men trying to diddle teenaged girls, and if the left have been trying everything they could to tie it to President Trump — something the Biden Administration could not do when it had possession of the Epstein evidence for four years, despite all of their attempts to disqualify and jail Mr Trump before the 2024 elections — it’s clear that plenty of other miscreants had been enjoying themselves on “Epstein Island.”
Nevertheless, those were the wealthy and powerful, those who thought they could do no wrong. But what we have been seeing more and more these days is not the wealthy and powerful, but ordinary, working-class citizens, heavily tilted towards public school teachers.
KY substitute teacher, assistant coach charged with sexually abusing student
By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | March 30, 2026 | 5:50 PM EDT
Bardstown police arrested a Bardstown High School substitute teacher on Monday and charged her with sexually abusing a student, police and school officials said.
Mary “Hanna” Mattingly, 31, was charged with first-degree sexual abuse and procuring or promoting use of a minor by electronic means, police said.
No, of course the Lexington Herald-Leader did not publish Miss Mattingly’s photograph, despite the fact it was available as a public record and has been available online from several other sources. The First Street Journal does publish those mugshots, and I use them whenever I can find them.
Bardstown City Schools’ Superintendent Ryan Clark confirmed Mattingly was also an assistant high school girls’ soccer coach.
Mattingly was listed in that role on the Kentucky High School Athletic Association website for the last two seasons.
Clark said in a statement that an anonymous letter was received Thursday “alleging inappropriate conduct by a female substitute teacher and a Bardstown High School juvenile.“
“Bardstown City Schools immediately initiated an investigation, removed the individual from her job duties, placed her on administrative leave, and alerted the authorities,” the school district’s statement said.
Several stories noted that Miss Mattingly (allegedly) communicated with the student on more than one occasion, a record of persistence. WBRD reported, “It had been going on for several months,” Bardstown Police Detective Eric Williamson said Wednesday. “Social media was the main avenue for the communication.”
But what none of the stories I could find told us whether the student she contacted was male or female. That is a frequent enough occurrence for me to conclude that the credentialed media do not want anyone to infer that homosexuality is in any way connected to sexual abuse, even though the John Jay Report noted that 81% of the victims of sexual abuse by an all-male clergy were boys. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to conceal the fact that a teenaged murderer was transgendered, and you’ll find several more such stories on this site.
I take no inference in the specific case of Miss Mattingly, though I’d note from her photo that she’s pretty enough to have attracted plenty of attention from adult men. Bardstown had a Census Bureau estimated population of 14,104 on July 1, 2024, and isn’t a particularly poor place as small towns in the Bluegrass State go.
Miss Mattingly is listed as being 31 years old, and that means she is certainly old enough to have known better than to mess with a student. There have been enough stories in the media concerning adults in general, and adult teachers specifically, going after minor students, that no one with an IQ above room temperature could have been unaware that attempting a sexual relationship with a minor, with a public school student, was tremendously dangerous. And no teacher of any experience could be unaware that students talk; this stuff can’t be kept secret for long.
Miss Mattingly is, of course, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Color me shocked that The Philadelphia Inquirer published the photo of an accused criminal. Technically, it isn’t a mugshot, so perhaps it’s allowed under a very narror interpretation of the newspaper’s stated mugshot policy. but I couldn’t find the newspaper’s Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — blurb, so I screen captured the image from the article itself. Since the photo caption states it was from a New Jersey state Supreme Court video, there isn’t a copyright issue.
Former South Jersey teacher charged with sexual assault began grooming student when he was 12, prosecutor alleges
Ashley Fisler was charged last week with sexually assaulting a former student at Orchard Valley Middle School in Washington Township.
by Melanie Burney | April Fool’s Day, 2026 | 3:33 PM EDT
A former Washington Township middle school teacher began grooming a student for a sexual relationship when he was 12 and abused him for years, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
The allegations against Ashley Fisler, who was charged last week with sexually assaulting a former student at Orchard Valley Middle School, were detailed during a detention hearing to determine whether she should be released pending trial. Superior Court Judge William Ziegler said he would issue a decision Thursday.
Note that Miss Fisler has been charged but not yet convicted. The newspaper stated that “Pre-conviction mugshots are inherently unfair, depicting suspects as criminals before guilt or innocence has been established.”
Fisler, who is no longer working as a teacher, is charged with six counts of sexual assault of a minor and one count each of endangering the welfare of a child and official misconduct of a public servant.
“This was more than just six isolated acts of sex abuse against a minor,” said Kylie Finley, an assistant Gloucester County prosecutor. “This was a pattern of six years of grooming, manipulation, and abuse by this defendant as a middle school teacher against one of her active and former students.”
Miss Fisler, now 36, left the school system in 2023.
Teachers are all college educated, with at least a bachelor’s degree, and are normally pressured to be working toward their master’s as well. They really can’t be unaware of the scandal by Mary Kay Letourneau, and the fact that Mrs Letourneau spent years behind bars for it. Public schools have orientation lessons for all teachers, and inappropriate relationships are surely discussed. The news of Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in 2019 was national news, and Miss Fisler couldn’t have missed it. You just can’t expect this s(tuff) to stay hidden forever.
Well, if the allegations are true, she’s in a heap o’ trouble.