Teacher World

I wanted to give you a quick update on the lawsuit filed by Dragan and Celija Vidovic against Ohio’s Mentor Public School District for bullying after the suicide of their daughter, Sladjana. They claim that their daughter faced relentless bullying at Mentor High School and measures were not taken to end the bullying which they claim resulted in her suicide.

Recent articles report that the Mentor Public School District has asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit stating that Sladjana was no longer a student at Mentor High School when she committed suicide in October 2008. As I reported in my first blog, she had decided to leave the school and had enrolled in an on-line school. The school district further claims that her parents were not legally able to bring a claim on her behalf because her estate was closed before they filed the lawsuit. Judge Ted Klammer, the Lake County Probate Court Judge claimed that the closing of the estate was a clerical error. (Records show that the estate was reopened recently retroactively to August 4th, the date it was closed.) We will have to wait to hear the federal court’s decision on this sensitive matter.

On a happier note, four seniors at Mentor High School were so upset by the national attention their school is receiving due to the suicides of four students from their school as a result of bullying that they decided to take some positive steps. Chelsea Lyons, Amanda Sojka, Jacklyn Grugrich and Jordon Greer put their love for their school into writing and garnered more than 800 signatures in a day in support of their school. They feel that this tragedy has brought them together as a family and are quick to proclaim their love for their school and their respect for their teachers. Good for them!

Let’s get real! This could be your school district or mine facing these charges. We all know how hard it is to stop bullying, and we also know that bullying is often excused as something that has always been around and will always be around. As a result, incidences are not dealt with as seriously as they should be. My hope is that all of this national attention will have a positive outcome. If it forces schools to take a tougher stand, to train its personnel to firmly and consistently deal with bullying, and to truly guarantee the safety of our schools then we will have learned valuable lessons, and we will safeguard our students as parents rightfully expect that we will.

Let’s work together nationally to create safe schools, and maybe we can all legitimately take pride in our schools as these Mentor seniors do.

Bullying, Teacher-World's Blog Bullying, bullying lawsuits, Mentor Public School District

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday about the internet. Oh, the internet! We all love to use it; to surf it, email, shop, chat, Skype, blog, Facebook, etc. My guess is that most of us rely upon using the internet daily for numerous purposes, as do I. It’s a blessing, but I learned yesterday that it can also be a curse.

We have a parent who is very difficult to deal with. We receive regular letters, phone calls, and emails from her in regards to her son. Frankly, it becomes quite tiresome as most of what she contacts us about are trivial matters and have nothing whatsoever to do with academics. One of her most passionate issues is particularly ridiculous, and when she was unable to get us to budge on this issue, she emailed our principal. He replied to her email by saying he would discuss the issue with us and get back to her, and he forwarded her email and his reply to us. My co-teacher and I are so weary of dealing with this same issue over and over that when we separately responded to the email, we both released some of our frustration over these ongoing, trivial attacks.

Having had my say, I thought nothing more about it until the next morning while getting ready for work. In a moment which I can only compare to being hit by a lightning bolt, the terrible realization struck me that when I sent my email message barreling back through cyber space, I clicked “Reply All”. As my heart beat faster and a terrible palsy hit my extremities, I realized that this mother would not only see our principal’s reply but my co-teacher’s and mine as well. Now, ours were not terrible, but in the hands of an already irate parent, it would be incredible ammunition. All I could think was that I had not only damaged my career but my co-teacher’s as well. I was literally sick with a lethal combination of fear and remorse. The rest of the morning dragged by. I reread our replies and orchestrated my defense for my superiors.

I broke all previous records for early arrival to work, and finally was able to reach my co-teacher by phone. With heavy heart, I confessed to my stupidity. Imagine my surprise when she confessed to clicking on “Reply All” as well! She told me to pull up the emails again and double check who they were sent to as she remembered checking that first and recalled that the mother was not a recipient. Miracle of miracles! We were both safe. My job no longer on the line, I felt a lightness I had been convinced that I would never feel again.

Now, here’s the lesson I learned and pass along to you: I will always respond professionally to any emails I receive through work, even if I am sure that they will only be read by those I work with. One mis-click could cost us dearly as teachers when responding to parents in any way. So, words to live by: Think before you click!

Teacher-World's Blog emails, internet, parents, professionalism, teachers

Well, I have to apologize. In one of my recent blogs about bullying, I made the prediction that if school systems didn’t tighten up their policy and follow through regarding the handling of bullying there was sure to be a lawsuit in the future. Now, I should have Googled “school systems sued for bullying” before I wrote that blog. I’m sorry I didn’t do my homework beforehand, but I did so over the weekend and the news is frightening. Many school systems are already under the gun and facing lawsuits right now. Lesson learned. Google first. Blog later. I will try to make it up to you by blogging about some of the lawsuits out there over the next several blogs. Hopefully, you will forgive my lack of prior research as I fill you in on some of these upcoming cases. I will start with two cases from my home state, Ohio.

Two years ago, in Mentor, Ohio, Sladjana Vidovic, a 16-year old student who had attended Mentor High School, committed suicide by hanging herself by tying a rope around her neck, the other end around a bed post, and jumping out of her bedroom window. She was found by her sister, Suzana, as her body hung over their front lawn. What precipitated this young girl’s suicide? She explained in a note that she had been tormented daily at her school, where she was made fun of for her native Croatian accent, called names like “Slutty Jana” or “Slut-Jana-Vagina”, had food thrown at her, was pushed down the stairs by a boy, and hit in the face with a water bottle by a girl. According to her sister, Sladjana had also received phone calls late at night telling her to go back to Croatia, and that she would be found dead in the morning.

Sladjana’s parents asked the school numerous times to intervene on behalf of their daughter and were assured that the school would take care of the situation. Eventually, Sladjana withdrew from Mentor and a week before she killed herself, she enrolled in an online school in an attempt to escape the bullying. After her suicide, the distraught parents tried to obtain a copy of her records reporting the bullying incidents but were told by school officials that her records were destroyed during a switch to computers. Sounds a little fishy, doesn’t it? The parents decided in August to sue the school system.

A second lawsuit was filed on behalf of Eric Mohat who is described as a flamboyantly loud freshman who was perceived as gay by his fellow classmates because he liked to wear pink, was a lead soprano in the choir, and enjoyed being randomly silly. Because of his behavior and his interests, he was bullied  for his supposed sexual preferences. He had his books knocked out of his hands, was flicked in the head by kids, called homo, faggot, and queer on a regular basis, and even bullied in math class. On March 29, 2007, he shot himself. In April 2009, Eric’s family sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent, and his math teacher. 

Both of these families are claiming that their children were bullied to death and that the Mentor school district did nothing to stop it even though they were made aware of the situation. As parents ourselves can we blame them?

Certainly trying to control bullying in our schools is very difficult, but we owe it to families like these to provide a safe environment for students to learn and grow. My heart goes out to these families, and they are not alone. I will continue to report to you on other cases like these because the more we refuse to ignore bullying, the greater the hope of ending these kinds of tragedies in the future.

Bullying, Teacher-World's Blog administrators, Bullying, parents, school districts, teachers, teen suicide

So we had conferences last night, and they went very well except for one. We have been concerned about one of our students who transferred to us this year from another school system. He appears to have some major processing issues, so even though this is a fifth grade student, we feel that he is a student who probably needs some testing. We are working really hard to get extra help for him and expected the parents to be grateful for our concern, yet it didn’t work out that way. Here’s the whole story.

This is a student who has huge problems processing oral and written questions and whose math reasoning and computation are severely limited. There is a total blankness as he tries to understand questions and figure out how to answer them. The more you prompt him, the more confused he gets. Additionally, math is a constant struggle. We requested further information from his previous school and it revealed a subtle but definite decline in performance. His former school was a private Catholic school; therefore, he didn’t take state achievement tests. Instead he took Iowa tests, and these revealed deficiencies as well. Based on these facts and what we are witnessing in the classroom, we felt it was imperative that we follow up with our intervention team where we would recommend testing for a possible disability. Because we are a co-teaching classroom, we have already provided all of the interventions that would be recommended by the team prior to testing, therefore it is likely that testing would be the only viable option at this point.

During our conference with this boy’s mother, we discussed our concerns and recommendations as to how we would like to proceed from here. Now, our hope and expectation was that she would be grateful that we are pursuing all possible avenues to help her son. But that is not what we got. Instead, it was apparent that she could not handle the prospect that her son might end up an IEP. We could not help thinking that she could not understand our desire to help her son, and we were a little offended.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how difficult it would be to hear the news that my child had a possible learning disability. It would feel a little as though the dreams I had for my child were suddenly crashing down around me. So, I excused this mother’s reaction as I contemplated what my own reaction would have been if given similar news. My hope is that once the initial shock wears off, this parent will see that our goal is to offer her son every possible opportunity to be successful. And maybe someday, she will even forgive us for the difficult news we felt compelled to give her.

Teacher-World's Blog IEP, parent-teacher conferences, parents, teachers, testing

I spend time reading inspirational things in the morning before starting my day. It helps me get motivated and gets me in the right frame of mind to attack whatever life hands me that day. Today’s reading made me think about teachers and the job we do. Let me explain why.

This morning’s message was about planning ahead but being willing to be flexible and ready to make necessary adjustments to your plans if they don’t work out. Do you see why I thought about teachers? Teachers are nothing if not flexible. We spend hours planning lessons and the activities that will follow those lessons. But unfortunately, on any given day those plans have the potential of going south. An inflexible person might panic or throw up their hands and say, “I give up. These kids just don’t get it.” But a good teacher has the knack of making quick decisions to adjust, modify, redo, or revamp a lesson in order to make it work for their students.

When you interact with students, you never really know what to expect. Some days go very smoothly and your plans work beautifully. Then there are those days where the wind seems to be whistling through your students’ ears and nothing seems to sink in. On those days, the best laid plans fall flat, and you’d better be ready to punt. The longer I teach, the better I get at punting in a hurry.

In hindsight, I probably was not much of a punter when I started my career. But, before too long it was glaringly apparent that this was a necessary skill I would have to develop if I planned to survive in my career and be the best teacher I could be for my students. And, coincidentally, I find that same flexibility that I practice in my classroom has served me well in other aspects of my life.

Flexibility. Try it on for size. If you are a teacher or a future teacher it is a necessary tool of the trade. Grow it, exercise it, use it frequently.

Teacher-World's Blog flexibility, students, teachers