CD 6 hopeful Josh Weil talks about incident of student discipline that went horribly wrong

A Democrat looking to flip U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz’s seat in Congress isn’t holding back when discussing one of the most difficult times in his teaching career.

“God forbid I was ever in a (situation) where I needed to restrain a student, but I was not trained and I didn’t do it right,” acknowledged Josh Weil, a 35-year-old teacher and a single father of two who talked with Florida Politics about a time he struggled to handle a middle school student in an Orange County Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) facility.

Weil, who calls himself the “leading Democrat in the race to fill the vacant congressional seat in Florida’s 6th District,” was written up in 2015 for what an Orange County internal reporting form says was an incident of having “grabbed student by neck, threw to ground, left bruise on student’s head” at the Orange Youth Academy.

The student accused Weil of “choking” and slamming him to the ground.

Weil subsequently was suspended for three days, but the settlement agreement returned two days of pay to him.

Nearly a decade after his altercation with the middle school student early in his career, Weil — who says he was cleared of “wrongdoing” by multiple investigations — reflected on it with Florida Politics.

“It was an incident where a kid got hurt,” Weil said. “You know, it was a Level 6 DJJ Center. I’d worked there for three years. You know, a student started hitting me. The staff was unable to respond to assist. I tried to restrain the student myself. I was not properly trained. I did not do a good job and unfortunately, he hit his head on the ground and it’s not something I’m happy about or proud of. I struggled with it for a while, whether I did the right thing.”

“I had a hand in front of him and a hand behind him, and I tried kind of bringing him down to the ground, and when we got down to the ground, he banged his head on the floor,” Weil added.

The teacher, who is nearly 6 feet tall, had the size advantage on the student, which helped him to subdue the youngster.

“He was a middle schooler. You know, he wasn’t as big as me, but he was striking me and I tried to restrain him in ways that the facility uses because I didn’t have any assistance and I didn’t know what I was doing,” Weil recalled. “A kid got hurt. I felt horrible about it. Still feel horrible about it but it was an attempt to respond appropriately and do something I wasn’t prepared for.”

The conservative Washington Free Beacon, which covered the 2015 incident near the tail end of Weil’s aborted campaign for Senate in 2022, also touched on other comportment allegations against Weil, including where he allegedly made a female colleague uncomfortable at the same school by poking and prodding her, blocking doorways and changing her computer screensaver to a picture of him.

“I am very uncomfortable with him touching me and I am also very uncomfortable having to put my hands on him to push out of doorways,” she alleged in a redacted email.

Weil denies that ever happened, but said if it did, it would have justifiably been considered “hostile behavior,” and that the district would have “handled it with an investigation and discipline.” He noted that no other incidents have happened since the trouble of 2015, and added that he is in a position of “leadership” at Kissimmee Middle School currently.

A campaign spokesperson in 2022 told the Free Beacon that what was documented exemplified “the type of workplace tension that happens from time to time, particularly in stressful environments, and was documented for posterity as it was quickly reconciled.”

Whether any of these historic issues come into play before the Primary on Jan. 28 or the General Election April 1 remains to be seen. Weil and Ges Selmont of Elkton will appear at various forums in the coming weeks, but a formal debate between the candidates appears unlikely.

For his part, Weil notes he has raised nearly $200,000 this cycle, and if he wins the nomination, he says he intends to spotlight the “crude antics” of likely Republican nominee state Sen. Randy Fine, a Brevard County politician backed by President-elect Donald Trump.

Among the claims: that Fine “showed up in a T-shirt, giving people the finger” during a court video hearing and “making public threats to two sitting female members of Congress on the day that he announced his race.”

“I mean, it’s behavior that you know if your kid acted like that you’d be mortified. I struggle to believe that the voters, the good people in District 6, would want to be represented by someone like that.”

Weil or any Democrat has a heavy lift ahead. Waltz won CD 6 with 66% of the vote this year and did even better in 2022, winning with more than 75% of the vote. Nearly 46% of the electorate is registered to the Republican Party. Meanwhile, less than 27% of voters are Democrats, according to the most recent L2 voter data.