Bad Vegan! No... job.

District fires vegan art teacher

Dave Warwak said he wouldn't return to the classroom unless Fox River Grove Middle School served only lunches free of animal products, but with meat still on the menu, school officials on Monday fired the art teacher.

"We are not going to go vegan at this time," said Pat Hughes, president of the Fox River Grove School District 3 School Board.

The board, which voted 7-0 to fire Warwak, said in a prepared statement that he told pupils not to tell their parents, teachers or the school's principal what he was teaching and that he repeatedly refused to answer questions from school officials on that subject.

The statement also said Warwak converted his art classes into classes on veganism and animal rights.

Warwak, who spoke on his own behalf, chastised administrators for hiding from pupils what he called the truth about healthy eating habits.

"You are ruining my world and eating my friends," he said.Steve Beyer, whose 13-year-old son was one of Warwak's pupils, told the board that the teacher was supposed to "teach art, not use his classroom as a platform for his vegan ideas."

Warwak, 44, of Williams Bay, Wis., was asked to leave school grounds on Sept. 4 because he refused to stop talking about the benefits of a meatless diet and the humane treatment of animals, he said.

Warwak said posters in the school cafeteria that promoted milk were of particular concern to him. He called pupils' meal choices in school "poison," and said that he would not return as long as the school menu remained the same.

Warwak taught at the school for eight years and said his annual salary was $55,000. The district, he said, should be training teachers about "humane education."

Warwak, a former fishing guide, said he became a vegan in January. Earlier this year, he gave his 8th-grade pupils a book, "The Food Revolution," by John Robbins, subtitled, "How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and the World."

Ninjas don't use samurai swords. Well, okay, ninjas use everything. But typically they use ninja-to, which lack the curve of the samurai sword, but are otherwise pretty similar.

I need to go watch the video, because I'm curious about this dagger too.

Warwak, a former fishing guide, said he became a vegan in January.

Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

Dude! That's not even a Japanese dagger!

I'm crushed.

Half an hour to lunch.

Dave Warwak said he wouldn't return to the classroom unless Fox River Grove Middle School served only lunches free of animal products

Uh, yeah. I mean, I could see his point if he were demanding that vegan options always be available...

Ninjas don't use samurai swords.

Dude! That's not even a Japanese dagger!

Now I wanna know what would have happened if the clerk had been pedantic and pointed this out to the 'Ninjas.'

I should've found out what the diagnostic code was. I could've compared notes here [link]

Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

You know what they say about the newly-converted....

To tie the WWII and genealogy thing together, my mother, who was a teenager during the war, has always been very conflicted by the fact that her great-grandmother immigrated from Germany. She was not pleased when I tracked down multiple lines of German ancestry on all sides of the family. Still, it was better than the Irish line I discovered.

A woman with a library of issues, my mother. I didn't tell her about the Catholics.

How far back have various people gotten with their ancestral tracking? I've got a couple of lines reliably back to the 1600s--hooray for early immigrants and obsessive-compulsive New England genealogists--and one line traditionally back to the 1200s. That early one, though, I look at with suspicion, because I've had connections made before on the strength of "Oh, grandpa always said we descended from so-and-so", only to discover that So-and-So died without children.

Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

I was going to say -- somewhere or other recently, I saw a conversation about obsessive personality traits, and about how, if it's not wild extremes of religion, you can easily become an insane fundamentalist about something else. Veganism was one of many examples, but I think anti-smoking was one too.

ita, you don't follow me around on the internet, do you?

Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

Ugh.

Anyone who tries to proselytize to me learns that it backfires quite spectacularly unless the doctrine in question involves things like boys in eyeliner or Apple products.