Pranks, Parties and Politics: Ron DeSantis’s Year as a Schoolteacher (original) (raw)

U.S.|Pranks, Parties and Politics: Ron DeSantis’s Year as a Schoolteacher

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/us/desantis-high-school-teacher-georgia.html

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At a private school 20 years ago, the future Florida governor was a popular history teacher and coach. But some students were taken aback by his comments on the Civil War and abortion.

Ron DeSantis taught at Darlington School, a private boarding school in Rome, Ga., in the 2001-02 school year, after graduating from Yale University and just before attending Harvard Law School.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Published Nov. 5, 2022Updated Nov. 17, 2022

Twenty years ago in the foothills of northwest Georgia, a new history teacher joined the faculty of one of the state’s oldest and largest boarding schools.

He was a brash young Ivy League graduate, an athlete who made it clear to anyone who was listening that this sojourn at Darlington School was a pit stop on his way to bigger things; maybe he would even be president some day, he told his students.

Amid the revolving door of recent college graduates who taught at one time or another at the independent private school, the teacher, just 23 at the time, was the talk of the 20-year class reunion last month at Darlington for one important reason: he is now governor of Florida.

The episodes that former students describe about Gov. Ron DeSantis’s year at Darlington offer a window into the formative years of one of the most polarizing figures in American politics, a rising Republican politician who is expected to easily win re-election next week, and then possibly set his sights on the White House.

As a baseball and football coach at the school, Mr. DeSantis was admired and respected by his team. As a teacher, he was remembered by some former students as cocky and arrogant. He once publicly embarrassed a student with a prank, hung out at parties with seniors and got into debates about the Civil War with students who questioned the focus, and sometimes the accuracy, of his lessons.

The governor who has taken on the “woke left” over the teaching of history, gender identity and sexual orientation showed signs back then of being a committed conservative, a young, cool teacher whom girls liked and boys envied.

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