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.