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.

What's Wrong With The Truth, Tom Schroeder?

About a year ago, your ever observant blogger was running an errand in the teeming metropolis of Frankfort, Kansas, and also minding her own business, when the Frankfort High School counselor, Tom Schroeder, pictured to the left, accosted her with loud accusations of "spreading lies". He then plunged into a loud verbal dissertation on the subject of out-of-district student transfers, despite the fact that no one had asked him about out-of-district student transfers, stating that there was no such thing in Marshall County. Curiously, your faithful blogger discovered this very application for out-of-district transfers right on his own school's website. That could only mean one of two things; either out-of-district transfers are only selectively offered for reasons of favoritism and the enhancement of football teams; or Tom Schroeder is a liar. Or it could mean both.

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?