VAIL, Ariz. — Cienega High School Principal Kim Middleton woke up early last Saturday to urgent messages from district administrators. They told her to call immediately.
A photo — in which Cienega math teachers wore matching white T-shirts on Halloween stained with red blotches and reading “Problem Solved” — was circulating rapidly online. Right-wing influencers were claiming that the educators were mocking conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Though the district quickly announced the shirts were a math joke and unrelated to Kirk, conservatives and some Republican officials from around the country amplified the image and portrayed it as a glorification of political violence. In the following days, the high school and its staff received more than 3,000 hateful messages, including dozens of death threats, and so many obscene calls that they disconnected the phones. Teachers stayed home. Sheriff’s deputies stepped up patrols on campus. Confused students asked if they were safe at school.
“They were devastated and terrified, and my kids were scared,” Middleton said. “No matter how much I say ‘We’re safe and we’re OK, I love you, we got you’ — people outside of our community who don’t know who we are and what we do terrorized us and targeted us for clicks.”
The disruption reminded Vail School District Superintendent John Carruth of a cyberattack, which the district has dealt with before.
“Except instead of bots, it’s people,” he said.
The deluge of threats that engulfed the district left administrators and teachers feeling helpless to stem the tide of harassment and shows how quickly social media storms can upend a small community based on a single image taken out of context and incorrectly tied to a political motive.
In the eight weeks since Kirk, co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was fatally shot while speaking at a college campus in Utah, conservative influencers and some Republican lawmakers have called attention to educators who make light of or justify it, leading to dozens of firings and suspensions.
But in the Vail School District, no one said anything about Kirk. The only connection was an inference because the red blood-like stains were on the left side of white T-shirts that some said reminded them of how Kirk was dressed the day he was shot.
“This feels like a coordinated effort, and I think people’s emotions are being weaponized,” Carruth said.
The district, located in an unincorporated area of Pima County, 24 miles south of Tucson that grew rapidly in recent years, has been the target of far-right extremism before. In 2021, a group of people angry about mask mandates took over a school board meeting and declared themselves as the elected leaders. One of the people involved in the takeover was later criminally charged for threatening to zip-tie a principal in a supposed citizen’s arrest; he was convicted of disrupting an educational institution, trespassing and disorderly conduct, sent to jail for 30 days and placed on probation for three years.
But those experiences hadn’t prepared them for a controversy on this scale.
The Vail School District originally posted the math teachers photo on Facebook in a batch of images from Halloween festivities late Oct. 31. It appears to have first been circulated individually in local Facebook groups devoted to town gossip before getting picked up by prominent conservative influencers on X, who continued to spread inaccurate claims about it widely.
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet tweeted at 12:06 p.m. ET Saturday that the teachers “deserve to be famous, and fired.” Kolvet has since deleted the post, but it had accrued almost 10 million views on X as of Tuesday.
Middleton and her staff moved quickly. They called all the teachers, and she said each denied the shirts had anything to do with Kirk or politics; they were a joke about math teachers slaying math problems, worn in the spirit of a “zombie run” activity the student council had organized. Additionally, at least three of the teachers said they were fans of Kirk, and some had voted for Donald Trump last year. No students or parents had complained, she said.
“One teacher said a kid asked him, ‘What’s the problem?’ And the teacher looked at him and went, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s solved,’ and then the whole class laughed,” Middleton said. “And I thought, oh, my God, that’s math humor.”
At 11 a.m. ET Saturday, the district posted a statement on Facebook that explained the context for the photo, but conceded that it could be misconstrued and apologized for it.
School leaders hoped things would calm down, but the backlash was just getting started.
After the district issued the statement explaining the photo, Kolvet posted it on X — just more than an hour after his initial comments — adding that he’d be relieved if they didn’t intend to reference Kirk, but he didn’t think everyone in the photo was innocent, and said teachers “have been among the worst offenders of mocking and celebrating Charlie’s assassination.” He did not respond to an interview request.
The photo only spread from there. One conservative commentator on X posted the photo alongside the names and phone numbers of the teachers. That post has received more than 20 million views.
Some Republican politicians also seized on the photo.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X that the Arizona teachers were “glorifying a murder.” He later posted the district’s statement and said people can “decide for themselves.” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, quoted a post featuring the photo and the teachers’ names and phone numbers, adding “Anyone else think this might be the best advertisement ever for school choice and homeschooling?” A spokesperson for DeSantis referred back to his posts. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Arizona State Treasurer Kimberly Yee, a Republican, posted on X that the shirts were bad even if they didn’t intend to reference Kirk. In a statement to NBC News, she said “threats of violence against anyone” are unacceptable, but that the shirts were “deeply disturbing and should also be condemned, especially when it occurs on a taxpayer-funded school campus.”
Others, like Ryan Fournier, co-founder of the national political group Students for Trump, refused to accept the district’s explanation.
Fournier, who falsely accused an elementary school administrator in September of justifying Kirk’s murder, updated his post on Facebook — where he has more than 1 million followers — Saturday about the photo with the district’s statement, but said, “I do not believe this for one second.” He did not respond to a request for comment.
District officials later found an email from October 2024 that included a photo of the teachers wearing the “Problem Solved” shirts at that time, and released a screenshot of it. Some on social media claimed it was created with artificial intelligence or photo editing software.
Arizona state Rep. Rachel Keshel, a Republican from Tucson, continued posting about it on X, stating, “I’m not buying his BS story one bit.” She also emailed the math teachers directly asking for the original photo so she could examine the metadata, district officials said. Keshel did not respond to a request for comment.
Hundreds of harassing emails, Facebook messages and phone calls poured in to district employees all weekend. Some were directed at the wrong math teachers — who hadn’t been in the photo — and others sent to random district staff, such as maintenance workers. The personal phone numbers and addresses of teachers were circulated online. Rumors spread that there would be protests and snipers at the school Monday. A guidance counselor said a steady stream of students came into her office this week asking about their safety.
One of the math teachers in the photo, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid further harassment, said he didn’t know anything about Kirk until he heard Saturday that people thought he was making fun of his death. It was a stressful weekend, he said, already worried about severe weather threatening extended family abroad, and trying to calm his wife and son who were worried about the reaction to the photo. He hid in his bathroom to cry so his wife wouldn’t see.
“Nowadays, everything is scary online,” he said.
The math department had considered doing a group costume based on the Gen Alpha meme “6-7,” the teacher said, but decided to reuse the “Problem Solved” shirts they bought on Amazon last year because they’d won a costume contest with them and they didn’t want to spend more money.
He, like half of the math department, stayed home Monday. When he returned Tuesday, he said, students told him they thought he was going to quit. “I told them, ‘No, I’m not gonna leave you guys behind, you know, we’re family.’”
Cienega High School is surrounded by housing developments and advertisements for people to make reservations on yet to be built houses. Cacti and palo verde trees dot the neighborhood. Students on campus are just as likely to be wearing a cowboy hat as they are to have brightly-dyed hair or intricately-designed braids.
Students were well-aware of the controversy but largely sided with the teachers. There were extra sheriff’s deputies stationed on campus and patrolling nearby all week.
As one student named Elijah, 15, stood feet away from an officer’s patrol car this week, he said he wished the people posting about the teachers online understood how they affected his school. “It’s making us feel uneasy and unsafe just going to school,” he said.
The student leaders of the Cienega High School chapter of Turning Point USA sent a letter Tuesday to the math teachers telling them they “hold your department in high regard.”
“As a chapter, we recognize that emotions and tensions have run high and we cannot express enough empathy for the massive misunderstanding it has multiplied into,” their message stated, according to a copy reviewed by NBC News. “Our goal as a club remains as it should always be, to foster respectful and healthy conversation, not to divide or harm.”
A few minutes after Middleton, the principal, read the club’s message that afternoon, she received another note from the front desk. A man had continuously called the school, demanded to know the names of the women answering the phone and shouted “are you ready to motherf-----g die?”
Middleton felt bad that front office staff making around $9 an hour were facing harassment for a situation they had no involvement in. The next day, she decided to send all calls to voicemail, so staff could filter and respond to parents.
But the staff has also seen support. Several parents dropped off iced coffee and doughnuts Monday and Tuesday, telling them they were doing so because they felt so bad about the harassment.
“This horrific loop of flinging poo and insults at others who we think disagree with us will never be broken online or via a phone call or via an email,” Carruth, the superintendent, said. “It’s only going to be broken by stepping out and meeting our neighbors.”
