An Assistant Principal Got FIRED For Reading The Book "I Need A New Butt" To A 2nd Grade Class
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NBC News- The assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired last week after he read the children's book "I Need a New Butt!" to a second-grade class. Toby Price, who worked at Gary Road Elementary School in Byram, a suburb in metropolitan Jackson, said he was asked to set up a Zoom class for the kids. Price said that when the principal didn't show up to the class as planned, he was instructed to read them a book.
"I text my boss, she said, 'Well, go ahead and read.' I wasn't planning on reading, but I went ahead and grabbed one of my books that I had nearby. One of my favorites. I read it: 'I Need a New Butt!' It's hilarious," he said in a phone call Wednesday. Price, who was assistant principal at Gary Road for three years, said he used to read the book at his previous school and didn't think twice about sharing it with the second-graders.
Minutes after the class ended, Price said, he was called to the principal's office and told that parents might complain. He was told to report to the district office the same day and was sent home on administrative leave. To his knowledge, no parents have complained about the book.
But the school took issue with it, telling Price that it was inappropriate because it used words like "butt" and "fart" and included cartoon images of a child's butt. NBC affiliate WLBT of Jackson reported that the superintendent of the Hinds County School District wrote in Price's termination letter that he showed "a lack of professionalism and impaired judgment" when he picked the book. For those reasons, he was fired.
I want to call out the state of Mississippi for being softer than a baby's butt, but I don't want to have Brandon F. Walker looking to kick my ass. Still though, what the hell are we doing here? No parents complaints, no foul should be the official motto of every school. And if any parents do complain but everyone knows they are just the asshole parents of the school district that bitch about everything, the ref can swallow the whistle and look the other way as well.
Don't give me the reason that this book used the words "butt" and "fart" either. Kids are saying those words the minute they learn how to talk. Shit, the reason those little monsters even try to learn how to start forming words is probably because there is nothing kids want to do more than say words like butt and fart. My 3-year-old will go an entire hour saying only those two words and his sister, who just so happens to be a 2nd grader, is laughing the entire time.
These kids just went through 2 years where they didn't know what their classmates faces looked like in person and ask what's going on in Ukraine if they happen to catch a glimpse of the news. I think they can handle if not need some butt and fart jokes along the way, like this picture from the back cover which is objectively hilarious.
In conclusion, all this should be a valuable lesson to any substitute teacher, assistant principal, or anybody that has to set up a Zoom class for students on short notice if you are still in the hellhole of virtual learning. Pop on a YouTube Kids video and let the algorithm handle the rest. It'll probably end in something worse than I Need A New Butt however you can pin the blame on the big brains at Google for whatever graced those children's eyes. But since you can't wheel these bad boys into a Zoom, that's the next best thing.
For more middling adulting advice, check out this week's Podfathers with myself, Large, and Chaps (who has needed a new butt for years) where we discuss how to get your kids to actually chip in around the house with chores, declare 3+ month salary engagement rings dead, and our personal old man war against Airpods.
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