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Thursday, June 27, 2019

Allegany County: Whitesville school alleged yearbook scandal - teacher praises Adolf Hitler UPDATED

This story began with emails to Wellsville Regional News...followed by a public statement by the Whitesville School. The emails show a photo of the Whitesville school yearbook. It shows a photo of Mr. Acor, a new high school history teacher. In his bio and description, he lists his favorite person as Adolf Hitler. The yearbook quotes him as saying Hitler..."did many great things...he was arguably the greatest public speaker in the history of the world." The school issued this statement:

Dear Families and Community Members,
It has been brought to my attention there may be some concerns and misunderstandings stemming from the collection of the yearbooks.  I thought it important to provide information from the District regarding this matter.
Please know, in the production of the yearbook, we try to give students the freedom and creative license to create and determine content.  That said, after the yearbooks were distributed several errors and oversights were found, including our discovery that a statement from one of our new teachers was incomplete, resulting in the description of a historical figure being mistakenly taken out of context.  Accordingly, we wanted to give the Yearbook Committee an opportunity to correct the errors and oversights, and to include a more accurate and complete quote from the teacher.
We would like to thank everyone for their cooperation and understanding as we make corrections and reprint the yearbooks.  We will be redistributing improved versions in the near future.
Please feel free to reach out to me with any further questions or concerns.  Otherwise, while we look forward to the 2019-20 school year, we wish everyone a happy and safe summer.
 
Laurie Sanders
Superintendent


We have a call in to the Superintendent, and if a return call is received, we will post her comments. 
UPDATE: The superintendent did return the call and said the posted statement on the school website was the only statement that would be made. I asked, "do you want to make an additional comment?" The administrator said "not at this time, thank you."