Is This Socialist Supporter the Iowa H.S. Teacher Who Handed Out a Pro-Communism Cartoon?

One of Friday's highest trafficked and most-commented on stories on The Blaze website was the item about a curious flyer handed out to High School students in a Des Moines high school.

The school has yet to directly respond to phone calls or emails from The Blaze. We did publish the entire, unedited reaction post from Roosevelt High School's website and have linked to what they claim is the full hand-out given to the students.

However, many questions still remain.

• Why is the school's principal, Ms. Danielson, not responding to any of our requests for clarification or comment?
• Why did the school publicly denigrate the radio coverage of the flyer, but refuse to appear on Simon Conway's show?
• Who is the teacher and what do we know about this person?

The first two questions remain unanswered. The third question about the identity of the teacher involved in this history lesson, appears to have been solved.  Based on information that has since been scrubbed from Facebook, we believe the teacher is a man named Patrick Brennan. Here is how we came about the information.

A Blaze reader from the area forwarded us the following screen capture of a now-deleted Facebook page from a woman who claimed to be the wife of the teacher in question.

(The Des Moines Register blog post referenced in this Facebook post is available here.)

If it was not perfectly clear that Stephanie Layne Brennan is claiming that her husband is the teacher in question, we offer this comment that was also added by Stephanie after someone asked her to clarify her initial post.

The Blaze also managed to acquire Ms. Brennan's personal email address and wrote to her on Friday, requesting further clarification. There has been no response of any kind from Ms. Brennan.

Additional investigative work turned up some interesting Facebook posts (also now scrubbed from the web) from a man claiming to be Stephanie's husband, Patrick Brennan.

While we have not connected with either of the Brennans via email or phone to confirm or deny that this Facebook user is the same one mentioned by Stephanie, we note that Patrick's profile appears to connect him to the woman in the Facebook post above.

His work status claims that he is a "Mental Health Instructor" and not a teacher at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines. However, his wife claimed that Patrick is new to the job of teaching at Roosevelt. "My husband has only been teaching for three weeks."

Reviewing more of the screen-capped pages from Patrick's now-sanitized Facebook account we note the following.

• His profile picture seems to show that his loyalties are with pro-union people;

• Patrick Brennan's pro-union stance seems to also be backed up by his posted feelings on Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker; (the profane descriptions are from Brennan)

• From the same screen capped images on Patrick Brennan's Facebook wall comes a statement supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement;

• Based on the previous postings, would it surprise you to know that Patrick Brennan is also a professed supporter of the Socialist Party of America?

If this is the teacher who handed out a flyer to high school students that seemed to subtly support the concept that Communism was better than Capitalism, wouldn't his public support of the Socialist Party USA make sense?

Our offer to speak directly to Mr. & Mrs. Brennan still stands. We would like to hear and post your side of the story. You have our contact information. The ball is in your court.

Investigative update:

Additional information uncovered during our background searches on Roosevelt High School and Principal Danielson turned up a controversial incident from the Fall of 2007.

Dr. Alveda King (the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) was scheduled to speak at the school, but was abruptly disinvited after Principal Danielson received a couple of complaints and discovered that Dr. King's speech (predominantly about the Civil Rights struggle) also included suggestions about abstinence and support for the pro-life movement.

The cancellation made the headlines in the community and according to a published report from Life News, even the ACLU found it to be unwise:

Surprisingly, the pro-abortion Iowa ACLU said the school was wrong to make the decision and representative Ben Stone told the Register that Danielson is doing a 'disservice' because it makes the school appear to be shielding its students from various viewpoints on abortion.