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Morro Bay teacher on leave after allegedly threatening student, video

November 3, 2021

David Kelley

By KAREN VELIE

A Morro Bay High School teacher has been placed on paid administrative leave after videos recorded by students show him calling a teen names and making threats while on the Los Osos Middle School campus for an after school volleyball game last month.

A video shared with CalCoastNews shows history teacher David Kelley calling a high school freshman a “boomba bitch.” Kelley’s daughter, wearing a yellow shirt, then appears to strike the other student, before walking away with Kelley.

The freshman yells, “Walk away with your little daddy,” and Kelley turns and charges at her.

“Snap your neck is what I do,” Kelley yells. “Threaten my child again and see what happens to you. See what happens to me.”

The teacher accused of threatening a student is on paid administrative leave while district staff conducts an investigation, said Dan Block, San Luis Coastal Unified School District’s director of human resources. Block did not release the name of the teacher in the video, though he did confirm Kelley is on paid leave.

“We have a code of conduct for employees,” Block said. “I expect employees to abide by that code.”

The district’s code of conduct requires educators to “respect the inherent dignity and worth of each individual,” and that they “deal considerately and justly with each student and seek to resolve problems.”

This is not the first time Kelley has been under fire for questionable on-campus comments he made to students.

In 2018, while serving as the head football coach at Morro Bay High School, Kelley made comments to a student athlete inside the football locker room that were “insensitive to the LGBTQ community,” school officials said. School administrators did not disclose exactly what Kelley said to the student, while announcing his termination as coach.


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Not to defend Mr. Kelly, but this is 45 seconds of what was obviously a much longer confrontation.

It’s a snapshot, a sliver of the whole story.

Threatening a child who is threatening your child doesn’t seem like much of a crime, if at all. Some would call it coming to the defense of loved ones.

What kind of a father would he be if he did not defend his daughter? There is a thing called Verbal Judo, where one uses harsh language to defuse a situation, police use it all the time. Some people, if you talk tough to them, they pause and reconsider their actions. It’s harsh but effective.

If he loses his job for defending his daughter, that would seem to me to be a rather harsh punishment for a momentary flare of anger at someone who is threatening your family, but he does have history with the incident in the locker room when he was football coach. So perhaps a change of occupation is in order.

As I see it, kids these days have no respect for authority, no respect for their elders, their peers or even for themselves.

We are raising a generation of hooligans, empowered to mouth off and insult, threaten whomever they don’t get along with at that moment.

They’ve been raised to believe there are no consequences to their actions. Burn down a police station? Terrorize an entire city like Portland for over a year, and no charges will even be filed. Quite a lesson being taught there.

It has all changed so very much from when I was a kid, many, many, years ago. If I mouthed off at an adult, any adult, my parents would have let me have it but good, and I would have deserved it.

And it would have taken just one incident and I would have learned to hold my tongue.

Is there more video that hasn’t been released? Editing can make any situation seem worse than it is.


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Verbal Judo is calmly using tactical non-threatening language to deescalate a situation. Calling someone a boomba bitch and threatening to snap their neck is pretty much as OPPOSITE of Verbal Judo as you can get.


And “ Walk away with your little daddy” is at best a taunt not a threat, and also entirely appropriate after an adult who should know better called you a bitch and his daughter sucker punched you.


27

He’ll never teach again. After matters like this become public, no one will hire him. Too much liability for the school. This is different from the situations where someone is asked to resign and in return the school is silent. This what happens with upper level employees in all fields, not just education.

Children learn from adults. After seeing the way adults behave these days its no wonder that the behavior of our youth is as bad as it is. Wait until they become voting adults.


16

This guy had sex with a student when he was a teacher and coach at Slo high around 2010. I went to school there then and remember it being a very big secret around campus. Pretty gross considering his other daughter was enrolled there at the same time and he was sleeping with one of her classmates and softball team mates. This guy needs to go to prison


16

Sadly this is not surprising at all. Hopefully the student, whoever he is, reports this to the police even 10 years later, so this POS gets what he deserves. If it was a very big secret that everyone knew, there has to be some evidence he could use to prove what Kelley did to him


7

Not to worry, thanks to the teachers union, he’ll just go one to teach at another district with everything he’s done hidden behind a cloak of “it’s a personnel issue”


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