SUSD Aware of Winkler online behavior as far back as August 2012

SCVTalk: What made you suspicious about Winkler when you first saw him in your daughter's classroom?

Tom: Before I saw Mr. Winkler my wife, who works at one of the schools in our district, spoke about a 'new' board member who was touring her school. When she started saying how he was doing a 'Heil Hitler' salute to everybody I honestly thought she was just exaggerating (like who would actually do that around a school?)

So a few months go by, and now it's my daughter's kindergarten Back To School Night at Bridgeport - Fall 2012. We're sitting there listening to the teacher, and this guy walks in, stands right in front of all the parents and blocks all our views. Like he was oblivious to the parents completely. I just thought he looked really out of place and creepy. Personally, I thought his clothes were wrinkled, and he looked like he hadn't showered in many days. Then my wife whispered to me that he was the new school board member. I was shocked. He never did anything overtly 'wrong' in the classroom - but I knew instantly that something wasn't right about him. I'm a programmer and fairly computer savvy, so the first thing I did when I went home was look up this guy on social media.

SCVTalk: Once you looked into his online life, what did you find most worrisome and how long did you look into Winkler?

Tom: I spent about a week finding what I could on this guy. The first place I looked was facebook. I was surprised that his account was public considering what I found there. Approximately 300 friends, and I'd estimate at least 30-50% of them were young girls (kids) who were fans of young girl singers. He was also friends with things like Tinkerbell and DisneyPrincess. Not only was he just friends, but he was actively sharing pictures of these girls on his public facebook wall.

I couldn't find any evidence that he has kids so all of this started to smell really bad.

After that I turned to twitter. Same profile photo as facebook, and same website. Also he says "I'm a teacher". I discovered that he made strange tweets such as "Have you tried riding any of the goats" to young girls. Also that he was following girls who were fans of several female kid singers.

Finally, I saw that he was following 4 "Adolph Hitlers". Then I turned to youtube. I thought "there's no way this guy has a youtube account that is public" Well sure enough, he did. And what I found on youtube was the worst of all. Let's start with his comments towards other users. If somebody disagreed with him, he felt compelled to reply in the most obscene and hurtful way possible.

He spoke with a tone of absolute superiority when conversing with people online. He spoke about how it was right his Jewish grandparents were exterminated by the Nazis. Probably the worst thing I found was this "The only sad piece of shit is your mother. I hope she will rot in hell. She should have got an abortion after being raped. Instead she got you."

When I read that I was in utter shock. This guy sits on our School Board? This guy walks around in my daughter's classroom? No way. I was furious. Then I happened to look at his favorited videos. Oh my God. He's got hundreds of videos up there of kids riding animals. He makes comments like "Ride em cowgirl" to KIDS. He comments that he wants more videos of the same kind. Before I was angry, and now I felt sick. So at this point I put together a lengthy email with screenshots and links with a summary of what I found. Of course there is SO MUCH stuff that it was impossible to send everything, so I had to rely on the diligence of the recipient to check out all the links I included.

SCVTalk: Eventually you decided to contact the entire board and administrators of SUSD with your concerns. Did you receive any response?

Tom: I called the district and spoke to the Board President at the time, Rose Koscielny in August 2012. She asked me to email her my findings to her personal email address. She also explained over the phone that there was little they could do, aside from always outvote him and make sure he is never alone with kids. It sounded to me like they were already in the practice of making sure he was kept under control as much as possible. So I emailed it all, and never hear anything back. I did show all this to several friends and my wife, all of whom were extremely disgusted.