While the job is frequently left off his resume, Republican Florida Governor and Tweedledum seeking a Tweedledee Ron DeSantis spent a year as a history teacher and sports coach at a pricey Georgia boarding school where he would party with underage students, according to a New York Times report.
DeSantis, then 23-years-old, spent the 2001-2002 school year at Darlington School, a private school for both boarding and local students in Rome, Georgia that currently has tuition and fees for non-boarding students at more than $23,000 for the 2023-24 school year. Having graduated from Yale in Spring 2001, DeSantis taught there prior to going to law school at Harvard in 2002.
Students remember DeSantis showing up at local student parties, where beer was served, on more than one occasion with at least one person interviewed saying he wondered why a grown man would socialize with underage teenagers. He also taught that the Civil War was a struggle between two different economic systems–one of which relied on human property–not a war to eliminate slavery (though he reportedly taught that slavery was a bad thing). His lessons were so biased, students openly challenged them in class, and his Civil War lesson became fodder for a satiric take in a “video yearbook” in which a student voicing DeSantis said the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.