Once upon a time, a foreign student overstayed his visa in the United States. He remained in the country for many years as an illegal alien. He was arrested on a gun charge in 2020 and was still allowed to stay in the US. He received a deportation order in May 2024, but even after that, he remained in the country. ICE officers confronted him last week, but the man fled in his car. He was eventually caught hiding in some shrubbery. He had a loaded handgun in the car, a fixed-blade hunting knife, and a bunch of cash. Oh, and by the way, he is the superintendent of the largest public school district in Iowa.
Des Moines Public Schools has 63 elementary and high schools serving well over 30,000 students. Only 11% of the city’s population is black. The local school board decided that all the non-black students needed to get some serious equity in 2023. That’s when they hired their dream candidate for the job, a man named Dr. Ian Andre Roberts.
The Des Moines school board consists entirely of Democrats. Not one Republican serves on it. The board chair is Jackie Norris, who was Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff. When the board was going through the selection process that led to Roberts’ hiring, they took the unusual step of doing it behind closed doors. The board claimed that the secrecy was necessary so that they could “select the best candidate.”
The best candidate, it turns out, was an illegal alien from Guyana with a weapons charge on his record from Pennsylvania in 2020.
“Doctor” Ian Andre Roberts’s bio states that he has a “Doctorate in education urban education leadership” (not a typo) from St. John’s University in New York. No such degree exists on the university’s website.
Roberts was hired with an initial taxpayer-funded salary of $270,000 per year. The taxpayers in Iowa also gave Roberts a tax-sheltered annuity equivalent to 14% of his salary, plus $600 a month to pay his car payment. Grand total: $315,000 per year, not including reimbursement for gas mileage.
This should enrage every public school teacher. Do you know the kind of background checks that teachers have to go through to be in a classroom with students?
In most states, a new hire goes through a 50-state criminal background check. Their fingerprints are taken and sent to the FBI. They also check teachers against the sex offender registry in all 50 states, as well as the child abuse and neglect registry. They verify the degrees that teachers have earned at the institutions where they say they earned them. They verify the teacher’s employment history, they check their professional licenses and certifications, and often make them take a drug test.
Meanwhile in Des Moines, the school board hired a superintendent with a prior gun charge on his record, who was in the country illegally, and who didn’t even have a work authorization in the US. Even after Roberts received a final deportation order in May 2024, the district kept him employed.
He’s on paid leave right now. Despite being in ICE custody awaiting deportation, he’s still collecting his $22,500 monthly salary (not including the equity and his car payment).
Rather than just fessing up to the whole thing, the school board is now attacking ICE. A bunch of Democrat legislators and groups held a big press conference in Des Moines to rush to Ian Roberts’s defense. Mazie Stilwell, the head of Progress Iowa, declared, “No Iowan is safe. We are living under a fascist regime.”
What a great point!
If a gun-toting illegal alien from Africa under a final deportation order isn’t safe, then no one is! So what if Ian Roberts had overstayed his visa by more than 20 years and had a prior weapons charge? Who will run the public schools in our reddest states if Trump deports all the foreigners who can barely speak legible English? Think of the children!
This is why local elections matter, folks. Republican voters have a bad habit of skipping out on local school board elections. They’re often decided by a handful of votes in favor of Democrats, who will then vote unanimously to hire an illegal alien felon to run the schools.
Speaking of elections, if a criminal like Ian Andre Roberts can “slip through the cracks” and land a $300K job in public education, don’t try to tell us that illegal aliens are not voting in our elections.