Dozens of Utah middle schoolers and their parents staged a walkout Wednesday to protest their district allowing so-called student furries to “bite,” “bark” at and “pounce on” their peers — a deranged accusation the schools said is nothing more than a wild rumor.
“They have their little tails, they get down on their hands and knees and they bark at us,” one student at the protest told Conservative radio host Adam Bartholomew in a video that has been viewed almost 27,000 times.
Another alleged that the young furries spray “human repellant” at other students and claimed that those who complain about the animalistic behavior get suspended.
The protest was preceded by an online petition titled “Students for Humans at School, not animals aka furries” demanding that the Mt. Nebo Middle School administration walk back on a letter it sent the student body the week earlier.
The letter reportedly supported students wearing certain accessories, such as headbands with animal ears, in the classroom — a message that district spokesperson Seth Sorenson said was widely misinterpreted.
The strange saga began several weeks ago when a group of students cornered another group in the lunchroom and threw food at them “because of the way they were dressed in the school,” Sorenson told The Post.
The kids were wearing headbands with ears on them, the district spokesperson said, but emphasized it was nothing out of the ordinary.
“These are 11- and 12-year-old kids and so sometimes they may wear a headband like that, sometimes the headband may have a giant bow, sometimes they’ll come dressed as their favorite sports hero,” he said. “It was nothing like what has been portrayed out there.”
School administrators intervened and then sent a message to students and parents reminding them to honor their slogan, which is — ironically — ROAR: Respect, Outstanding, Academic and Responsible.
“And so they sent it out to all of the teachers to share with students some information about ROAR –meaning that as students in the school, they need to think about how they treated each other, that they need to be understanding and patient and tolerant of each other because the goal is to have responsible citizens in the school and that involves treating each other with kindness,” Sorenson said.
That’s when the letter was blasted across the internet, with parents assuming that the school was siding with one specific group and supporting students’ rights to wear what some deemed as furry accessories to school.
The debate was picked up by conservative talking heads, like Bartholomew — whose wife is a far-right candidate running for the Utah State Board of Education in the very same district.
Controversial page Libs of TikTok further blasted the false message, claiming that the furries were “terrorizing” their peers: “Students claim that the furries bite them, bark at them, and pounce on them without repercussion,” the account wrote on X.
But the school district said none of the bizarre accusations are true — rather they’re rumors that snowballed on the internet as they got further away from the actual source and took off with right-wing personalities.
“Those rumors are completely unfounded and actually never occurred in the schools,” Sorenson said, noting that the students are under constant adult supervision and are being monitored by security cameras throughout the building.
“If you go out to the social media sites, you’ll see this most of these are hearsay and third party, where they’re saying, ‘Well, someone told me that they had this happen’ We have no evidence of any of those things happen and we do take those kinds of things very seriously.”
Furthermore, the very same letter that asked students to respect one another re-iterated the district’s ironclad dress code against any clothing that would disrupt learning.
“We don’t allow masks in any of our schools. We don’t allow costumes. So those kinds of things has never been permitted. There are no litter boxes in our school. There are no any of the things that are being perpetuated out on the internet,” Sorenson said.
“Those are completely fictitious, that that’s not happening and it’s not allowed in our buildings and our administration is very firm on making sure those things don’t happen because that would distract from learning and that’s really what we’re all about.”
