- February 26, 2025
Seabreeze High School Teacher Robert Hernandez is looking to raise money so he can distribute his comic book to local middle school students for free.
High school kids hung out around the only two routes on his way home from school. Every day they were beating him up and taking his money. So he decided to take matters into his own hands and brought a knife. He was expelled.
His teacher, Robert Hernandez said this type of misunderstood situation happens all too often.
“In the paper, you see ‘boy brings knife to school,” Hernandez said. “but in reality it’s a rational response for a middle school kid in that situation. There’s a lot of misunderstood things that are categorized as violence.”
Hernandez, who is currently a teacher at Seabreeze High School, said middle school students are more vulnerable to violence because that is when their behavior patterns are being learned.
“i want to get to them before their personalities are revealed,” Hernandez said. “I’ve seen a lot of terrible schools on paper that have some really good kids that are steamrolled into some terrible choices. It’s tragic. That’s where my motivation came from.”
Hernandez, a teacher since 1984, recently developed a solution to separating the real bullying from misunderstood middle school actions. “Violence: A Graphic Essay,” is a comic book written by Hernandez that addresses the issue of violence in early teens.
“I wanted something that would stick,” Hernandez said. “And the graphic novel is a pure American art form. It’s something that kids actually read.”
Currently, the book is only available online at Amazon but Hernandez wants to take it a step forward. He set up a Kickstarter site to raise money to be able to print the book and distribute it to kids all across Volusia County for free.
“$16,500 would take care of every kid in Volusia County,” Hernandez said. “I’d be happy if every kid in American had one. I’ll print as many as the funding allows.”
Hernandez hopes the book will help students to identify when an innocent mistake can be confused as bullying.
“A kid can get bumped in the shoulder in the hallway and be terrified of that hallway for six months,” Hernandez said. “A thing that he thinks is bullying the person could be totally oblivious to. There are some evil people in the world but because of the noise of all these minor incidents, the jerks are kind of hidden."
Visit Hernandez’s Kickstarter page to learn more: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1166920159/violence-a-graphic-essay?ref=email
