For the past three weeks, while my students have continued attending my classes and dealing with a substitute teacher, I have been sitting at home waiting for the hearing which may end my teaching career in Joplin, Missouri.
And it all started with this Daily Kos diary.
On the surface, it does not seem like much. The diary, which was published Dec. 16, shortly after Sandy Hook, was titled “Violence, Statistics, and American Education.”
That doesn’t sound like enough to have me removed from my classroom and escorted to my car by a police officer, but toward the end of that diary, I noted that my book, No Child Left Alive, also dealt with a school shooting situation. I offered it for two days as a free download.
Then I copied and pasted it on two old blog sites, which I almost never use any more (except occasionally to draw a handful of search engine referrals for some of my writing).
No Child Left Alive has the tagline, “If the shooter doesn’t get them, the system will.” The plot takes place during one year at a dysfunctional public high school where teachers have to deal with administrators and policies that put them at a severe disadvantage when it comes to doing their jobs.
In other words, they have to deal with the same kinds of problems I wrote about on another national blog recently when I recommended that young people should not become teachers. The point of that blog was to start a conversation about the role of teachers and how they deal with rogue administrators and politicians, those who do their best to micromanage teachers and thwart their ability to teach children.
Because No Child Left Alive was about education and because it contains sex, violence, and profanity (it is about a high school, after all) I published the book under my real name, William Turner, and not the name I have always used. That was so my students would not come across it when they searched my name, as many of them have done once they have learned that I write books.
Now because I copied and pasted that Daily Kos diary on a blog called Room 210 Discussion that my students don’t even know about, I have been charged with “immoral conduct” and my firing has been recommended.
I also have been charged with transgressions involving another book I published, Scars from the Tornado: One Year at Joplin East Middle School, a book which featured my story and my students’ stories about the May 22, 2011, Joplin Tornado. Though I spent approximately $5,000 on the book, which has been well documented, and have actively been searching for a charity for proceeds from Scars, I have been accused of profiting from students’ work and from not receiving parental permission for using their work. This despite the fact that I haven’t made a dime of profit off the book and I had a folder full of signed parental permission slips. The only question the H. R. person asked about that during the four-minute interview was about whether I had advertised the book on my classroom website. (And, yes I had. I thought the book was something that would make Joplin and the Joplin School District proud.)
The whole "interview" is included in the audio that accompanies this diary. The audio goes through the questioning and then through my being escorted by the police officer, H. R. director, and two principals down a hall full of children who had just been released from their seventh hour classes and then of me being taken out to my car by the police officer.
For all of those who have already been run out of the Joplin School District by a rogue element within administration, I only wish they, too, had been able to have a recording of the way they were treated.
During the interview, I was interrupted when I tried to explain and told I would get a chance to tell my side of the story. I never heard from them again. Ten years of dedication to the school district was rewarded with four minutes of questions and no opportunity to defend myself.
Of course, that was the whole idea.
I have been heartened by the support of the community, students, former students, parents, taxpayers, and people from outside of Joplin.
Nothing can take away the three weeks of teaching that have been stolen from me and from my students and continues to grow with the passing of each day. It makes me angry and it makes me sad.
This kind of arrogance was the reason I wrote No Child Left Alive in the first place.
At the moment, the only thing allowing me to hang on to my job is Missouri's teacher tenure law, which requires that I be given a hearing. If some legislators have their way, the next person who runs into this situation will be simply be unemployed.