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?