Kyron's Parents, After Five Years

Kaine Horman, Kyron's dad, talking about his missing son and the ongoing efforts to find him.

Note: Terri Moulton Horman was not seen releasing red balloons anywhere today.

The Last Turd In The Punch Bowl; Vermont Schools

Addison Rutland Supervisory Union, a Vermont school district, learned an important lesson last week about violating the civil rights of parents. A $147,000 lesson, to be exact. The school thought that a teacher who whined and complained about a concerned father was more important than the community, which included the father, so they barred him from attending any meetings about his child or any functions. They cited teacher fear as the reason, and the behavior they listed was simply the father's normal speaking voice, which apparently was not musically sweet enough for them, and his failure to achieve agreement with whatever silly-assed thingies had become all encompassing to the teachers and the school at the time. This is what a lot of public schools do when they perceive turds is their punch bowls......or, "koolaide" bowls, as the case may be!

A federal judge, on the other hand, determined that the school district was, (drum roll) wrong, and that the school had discriminated against Marcel Cyr. He was NOT required to belong to a protected minority, either; his rights as a member of the community and as a parent had been violated. His position as a parent was determined to be more important than a teachers desire for guaranteed and continued parental agreement. Since the ruling came from  federal judge, this is a bummer for public school teachers everywhere, not just in Vermont!

There was a principal in Northeast Kansas who tried something similar when a parent disagreed with one of his teachers. The parent, a mother this time, found herself in a state of disagreement with a teacher who dropped a female high school freshman off by herself on a highway and left her there; the only occupied house being the dwelling of a sex offender. When the parent discovered the latter, she dropped by the school to ask what protections are afforded children in the presence of sex offenders. She took a copy of the pertinent Kansas sex offender registry page with her. The principal, upon looking at the information, crumpled it, tossed it, and told her that the man was not really an offender! Seriously? The parent had only lived there for about a year, not long enough to peruse the criminal cases of individuals she had not even met, so she felt obliged to take the word of a Kansas jury or the plea of the defendant, himself, as the actual upshot, here. The principal ended his rant by leaning over the counter in the office, index finger extended, nearly taking a slice out of the mother's right eye! Not only did she disagree on many levels, she called the police.

Mr. Northeast Kansas principal ( also called Dean Dalinghaus) got a visit from an officer, who not only wanted to know why he had been so violent, but wanted to know what children were doing, unsupervised, so close to sex offenders and why a child had been lost for the better part of a day with no missing persons report. A whole slew of unanswered questions about school policy ensued, and it was perceived that there may be a "turd in the punch bowl". Since the koolaide previously served by the school to the community involved the lie that there was never any crime, nor any potential for the same, and no dangers that are not necessarily to crime: implementation of child safety standards used by the rest of the nation would never work out in this part of Kansas. So the mother was banned from school. But guess what? The principal's boss decided otherwise, he made the principal apologize! He not only cleaned out the punch bowl of the real turd, rather than the perceived turd, but he also dumped out as much of the koolaide as the local school board would allow. From the looks of things, he may have also saved USD 380 $147,000!

The superintendent of the school district in Vermont decided that if he could not discriminate against dissenting parents anymore, he would just have to take more money away from the children and education to hire an off-duty police officer to stand guard at meetings and other school events. Not only did he throw away the award of the lawsuit, he is willing to continue to throw away childrens' education dollars, over pettiness and perceived turds in the punch bowl.

Guidance Counselor At USD 380 In Kansas Lies To A Parent

Interesting. In a state that allows students to transfer to different schools, outside of the student's home district, Tom Schroeder, the guidance counselor of Frankfort School in USD 380, noticed a parent in the public library who had tried to do this and accosted her in front of everyone about it. He insisted that Kansas offers no such options, which is contrary to what the superintendent had told the parent. Tom Schroeder's inappropriately and violently intoned rant was completely false, as the Topeka Capital Journal ran an article casually addressing the subject of transportation for out of district students! He may look enough like a circus clown to dance circles around the average frankfurter about this, but the parent he verbally attacked in public had actually heard an attorney at a USD 380 school board meeting discuss the ease and legal access Kansas parents have to schools outside their districts. So why did this parent have a problem? It all turned out to be a handful of teachers and a principal who do not understand what FERPA means. That's right, boys and girls, it wasn't legal to discuss, with cohorts, the horrors of parental disagreement with teacher criminality without a release of information from said parents. No more legal than a guidance counselor publicly yelling at the top of his lungs, before witnesses and cell phone cameras, about his lack of agreement with the parents of his students. Yet another reason to send one's children elsewhere for school; four or five children were turned into potential witnesses. Way to go, Frankfort. Thank the Gods for cell phone video, as well.

Something that the school in Frankfort would probably like to lose in the midst of all the faculty theatrics and administrative circus stunts is the reason a parent initially desired to send her children to school outside of the district. Tom Schroeder gets away with not only disrespect and public violations of federal confidentiality laws, but with driving student away from school property for sporting events and leaving them with no supervision. One child was abandoned by herself, and only made it home because she accepted a ride from a stranger. The rest of Frankfort Kansas, seven hundred and fifty people or so, thought this was funny, and the school board finds his tenure acceptable. This may be one of the reasons Governor Brownback recently signed a bill eliminating tenure for public school teachers. It sucks for the teachers who are decent, but one or two creeps like the above described guidance counselor ruins the profession for everyone.

In Hawaii, a man was recently convicted of second degree child endangerment for doing something similar, only the distance in this case was only a mile. The age of the child involved was not shared. The distance at which the Frankfort guidance counselor  abandoned his student was four miles. And when he realized she was officially missing, his response was that of going home and having dinner. Here's what the Hawaii judge, Kathleen Watanabe, had to say about cases like this: She said that it is dangerous for children to walk alongside the road due to potential pedophiles.  (Yahoo news)

Why would anyone of reasonable genetic variation want to send a child to Frankfort? Especially while Tom Schroeder is employed?

A Letter To Kansas Superintendant About A School Staff That Favors Criminals Over Decent People

For the sake of documentation, I always publish my letters to the superintendant of my childrens' school. That makes documentation easy to obtain at a moment's notice, and it's also an interesting snapshot of how schools are run in Northeast Kansas. I have attempted to protect such information as whole names or proper nouns.

 

 

 

Dear Mr. FXXX,

Yesterday, at school, my daughter, RXXX, had an interaction with another student, SXXX, that required an incident report. SXXX had an injury to his leg that was healing, and RXXX noticed a scab and asked him about it. He asked her what she was talking about, and she touched the scab. He winced, and then claimed that he had reinjured himself. Mrs. XXXX did not think that the incident was worthy of an indicent report at first, and knew that RXXX was not attempting to harm SXXX, so she let it go. Later, that evening, while I was driving home from elsewhere in this town, I noticed that a vehicle was following me. When I parked in front of my house, SXXX's mother, Janet HXXX, stopped in the middle of the road for a minute, and then pulled in front of my van and parked her car. She and SXXX got out, and proceeded to hollar, blame, cry fake tears, and told me that RXXX should "have to go to court" because it was her fault he winced and got hurt. I asked for documentation, and they had none. I told them that the conversation was over, and they stayed and continued to yell. I went inside, and called Mrs. XXXX and got her version of events, which is what I think Janet HXXX should have done. If she was upset enough to seek me out after school was over for the day, why did not Dean DXXX or Tom SXXX handle it, and if truly necessary, call me to the school and discuss it there with RXXX, Janet, SXXX, and myself? Leaving Janet to the wind was wrong; she should have had recourse to the school. If she did have recourse to the school officials yet chose to harass me anyway, then she committed a crime, and I will follow up on it.

 

I spoke with Sheriff Dan HXXXX this afternoon about my encounter with her. He told me he would visit her and tell her to leave me alone. Yet, when I went to see my daughters in the school play tonight, she was there! Why? I asked Dianna YXXX and Tom SXXX what the procedures are when the sheriff tells someone to stay away from someone else, and I am the injured party here......she's the one who came to me wanting to harass me, not the other way around. Tom SXXX yelled at me and denied any responsibility and Dianna YXXX told me that she called the sheriff herself and was told that Dan and I never talked. I called the police on my cell phone (she would not let me use the school phone) and they told me that they did not tell her that. The police have no reason to tell me something that isn't true, so as far as I'm concerned, I was lied to by Dianna YXXX. Tom SXXX does have a measure of responsibility for incidents such as the one that happened between RXXX and SXXX, and his behavior was unprofessional. Dianna YXXX also told me that Janet told her that she never even confronted me about the incident, and that I was lying. I guess it's easy to get away with things like that when documentation does not take place. Once again, I do not fault Mrs SXXX for not writing an incident report because she didn't think it was necessary, but if a parent was as upset as Janet was last night, wanting to blame me, even though I was nowhere near the school when it happened, why didn't Dean call me to talk to me and RXXX at the same time about it? Someone did a crappy job of handling the whole thing, and it wasn't me.

 

Because Janet harassed and stalked me, I intend to follow it up with the police. I would really appreciate it if your school personnel would keep their opinions that I am "a bad person", or that "what I said wasn't true" to themselves. Also, if I get a restraining order against her, or if the sheriff tells her to leave me alone, I think I should be the one to be able to enjoy sharing my childrens' education with them, while she leaves me alone. I think the school should be more concerned with protecting me, since she was willing to harass me after school hours without any documentation of what happened. I don't think anyone should blame me for being upset, and if they do, I think they should keep it to themselves. I do not drive to peoples' houses and scare them, she does. Please remind everyone to keep their obvious and unwarrented disrespect for me under wraps. My children are starting to notice, and I am tired of it.

 

I deserve an apology from Tom SXXX for the way he spoke to me, and since he did it in public, perhaps he should apologize in public.