Teacher World

A story from Florida at the end of August really has me fired up. It’s a story about a 54-year old, devout Baptist who teaches history at Mount Dora High School in central Florida. And it’s a story about bigotry at its ugliest.

Many would say that Jerry Buell is a very good teacher. In fact, in 2010, he received Mount Dora’s (a public school in the Lake County School District) teacher of the year award.

However, Jerry made a terrible decision this summer after watching a report on New York State’s legalization of gay marriage, when he angrily posted the following vicious attack against gays and gay marriages on Facebook:

“I almost threw up … Now they showed two guys kissing. If they want to call it a union, go ahead. But don’t insult a man and woman’s marriage by throwing it in the same cesspool… God will not be mocked. When did this sin become acceptable?”

Buell published a second post after some of his Facebook friends reacted negatively to what he had posted, saying: “If one doesn’t like the most recently posted opinion, based on Biblical principals and God’s law, then go ahead and un-friend me. I’ll miss you like I miss my kidney stone from 1994.” (Nice, Christian sentiment, right?)

It should come as no surprise that the school system found his remarks unacceptable and launched an investigation to determine whether Buell had violated the district’s ethics code thus compromising the district’s students’ safe and unprejudiced learning environment.

They also wanted to investigate whether he had violated separation of church and state when, among other issues, he had written on his class syllabi, “I teach God’s truth. If you believe you may have a problem with that, get your schedule changed, ’cause I ain’t changing!” (Lovely grammar, by the way! Part of God’s truth, Jerry?)

Buell was removed from the classroom while the investigation was underway, and he continued to defend his Facebook comment. He told the Orlando Sentinel, “It wasn’t out of hatred. It was about the way I interpret things.” And he defended his right to express his personal opinions outside of school when he is no longer serving as a teacher or government employee. He even claimed that the only thing that was being violated during this process was his own freedom of speech.

The American Civil Liberties (ACLU) had to agree, noting that while they “strongly” rejected his views regarding homosexuality and objected to any teacher’s “anti-gay statements that create a hostile educational experience,” Buell was “on his own time” and, as a result, he was protected by the First Amendment.

But, Lake County Schools worried that Mount Dora High School, and maybe the whole district, would be associated with Buell’s opinions, so they pointed to the district’s newly adopted social-media guidelines in which teachers were warned, “It is vital that you conduct yourself in such a way that it does not adversely affect your employment and/or the District.”

Unfortunately, this guideline was hardly a weapon against the First Amendment. Communications professor and First Amendment expert at the University of Florida, Clay Calvert, told TIME that he understood the district’s desire to balance Buell’s right to free speech “with the need of the school to perform its education function.” However, he noted that five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court asserted that public employees enjoy the protection of free speech when they are speaking as private citizens about “matters of public concern” such as gay marriage (Garcetti v. Ceballos).

And last year, a federal judge in South Florida ruled in favor of a high school student, represented by the ACLU, who was suspended as a result of her written rants about a teacher she did not like on a Facebook page; which means this same freedom of speech extends to social media.

So, on August 25, Jerry Buell was allowed back into his classroom where he will undoubtedly be teaching a number of students who are questioning their sexuality and now, thanks to his public Facebook rant, know just exactly how their teacher feels about such questions.

So, the question is: did Lake County Schools distance themselves enough from the homophobic rants of Jerry Buell by registering their objections to his statements which have the potential of making Mount Dora a place that is perceived as unfriendly towards gay students, teachers, and staff?

“The one thing about social media in this case,” says Calvert, “is that at least now people know who this individual really is.” And, while some will probably consider Buell a martyr for publicly stating what other homophobes feel, many will undoubtedly see him as a public example of intolerance because the Lake County School District openly responded to his anti-gay pronouncements just as they would have if he had disparaged a group due to their race or religion.

It angers me to think of the harm that this “Christian” teacher may already have done to some of his students who are trying to figure out their sexuality, and it angers me, too, that he might have given students who are as homophobic as he is tacit permission to harass and bully those who are struggling with their sexual identity.

 Buell has displayed various rules on the walls of his classroom. Ironically, the first rule is “Respect”. And another one reads, “A cruel word cannot be unsaid.”

Well said, Mr. Buell. Too bad you don’t practice the same rules you expect from your students.

In closing, I would leave Mr. Buell, and those of a similar mind, with the following religious lessons which I am not sure you have learned:

* God, and only God, is the judge of man.
* We are called to love each other without judgment, and to comfort the oppressed; not to beat them down.
* Your faith is shown by your actions, not by the words of your mouth. So your pious sounding words only serve to reveal your hatred for your fellow man. Which I believe is a sin.
.

Bullying, Teacher-World's Blog Facebook, Florida, freedom of speech, gay marriage, Jerry Buell, Mount Dora High School

This will be a short update on Jared Michael Cano, who was arrested, if you recall, on August 16, after a tip sent authorities searching his house in Tampa, Florida, where they found evidence of an elaborate plot to murder dozens of people at Freedom High School, on the first day of class.

When police searched Cano’s house, they found bomb-making materials as well as a detailed manifesto containing his minute-by-minute plan to kill 32 people at his school, including two vice principals who he claimed had ruined his life. (Cano had been expelled from Freedom High over a year ago due to an off campus incident, and was being home schooled by his mother.)

Additionally, police have a recorded phone call in which Cano told a confidential source about his plans to attack the school.

On August 31, Cano appeared in court where it was decided that he would be tried as an adult, according to an announcement by the State Attorney’s Office that afternoon.

Mark Cox, spokesperson for the State Attorney’s Office, said that after a “careful review of the crime, evidence, and interviews” the Attorney’s Office felt adult charges were warranted.

Cano, who has been held without bail at a juvenile assessment center since he was arrested on August 16, was moved on September 2, to the Orient Road Jail, which is an adult facility.

Video shot of Cano’s arrival show a seemingly calm but rather defiant young man, wearing an Ohio State jersey. He smiled, and muttered curses at a reporter who asked him if he had anything to say. While he was being booked, he answered the officers’ questions and is even seen laughing at one point, seemingly unconcerned about his new surroundings.

Officials with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said that Cano will be kept away from the general population. HCSO Major Kenny Davis explained that how long he is kept separate from other inmates “depends on how soon the media attention dies down and we feel like he’s not in any kind of danger from other inmates around him.”

The sheriff’s office explained that even though he is being charged as an adult, he will only be released into the general population with other juveniles who face adult charges.

Ironically, Cano’s move to the adult facility came only a few short hours after the police officers who thwarted his intended attack were being honored by the Tampa City Council.

“A lot of time, we get tips and you really can’t corroborate it, don’t have probable cause to do something, but here, everything fell in order the way it was supposed to fall and it allowed us to do enforcement work at a quick pace,” said Major John Newman with the Tampa Police Department during a press conference Thursday morning.

Cano has been charged with threat to throw, project, place, or discharge a destructive device, possession of bomb making materials, cultivation of cannabis, possession of drug paraphernalia, and possession of marijuana. Had he been tried as a juvenile, he could have been released by the time he was 21-years old.

However, since Cano will be tried as an adult, he could face 35 years in prison if he is convicted.

Perhaps that sobering fact hadn’t fully settled in when he was caught on video being so tough. Or perhaps it had, and we witnessed some false bravado. Any way you slice it, this young man has a rough road ahead of him and plenty of time to regret his horrific plan.

School violence, Teacher-World's Blog Florida, Freedom High School, Jared Michael Cano, Orient Road Jail, Tampa

So much new information has surfaced regarding Jared Cano, the 17-year old who was charged with planning to blow up his former high school, that I felt it was important to do a follow-up blog which might help to explain, to some degree, the multiple problems which may have lead to his latest arrest. (If you haven’t read my blog from Wednesday, you might want to read that first.)

First, Cano’s parents are divorced, and he lives with his mother who is a math teacher at Riverview High School in the Hillsborough County school district. He has not seen his father for several years.

Jared’s first skirmish with the law was in 2007. He was only 13-years old when he was accused of stealing CD’s out of a car. Then in 2008, police caught him with a stun gun. Although no charges were filed, in January 2010, he was a suspect when a neighbor’s screened-in porch was broken into. Nothing was found missing, so he was released.

Jared had several problems in his neighborhood when he was 15-years old. According to information from his neighbor, Jessica Parries, her family had several run-ins with Jared at that time at New Tampa’s Camden Live Oak apartment complex, and she admits that because of these problems, she wanted nothing to do with him.

Trouble apparently began when Jared began bullying students from Liberty Middle School at the bus stop, including her son, Alex. After this incident, Jessica said she called Jared’s mother and told her that even though the boys had mutual friends, she did not want Jared hanging out with her son anymore.

Jessica admitted that she was sympathetic toward Jared’s mother saying, “She is a hard-working mother. Her daughter is a really good student.” She went on to say that during her conversation with her, she “seemed like she was at her wits end. Nothing was working.” As a matter of fact, details from Jared’s 2008 police report state that Jared was “growing verbally angry…by yelling profanity at his mother and in general,” so she probably was overwhelmed.

In March of 2010, the situation escalated when Jared was charged with stealing a gun from John Robert Parries, Jessica’s father. On this particular night, in spite of the fact that Alex was not supposed to have friends over, he let Cano and another teen come into his house while he was waiting for his aunt to pick him up for a trip. When Alex’s aunt arrived, he asked the boys to stay in his apartment until he left so that his aunt wouldn’t know he’d had anyone over. Later, when John Robert Parries got home, he discovered that his gun, a black Hawes .25 caliber handgun, was gone so he reported the theft to the police.

That evening, when police showed up at Jared’s door, they were met by a shirtless, shoeless Jared who held an aluminum baseball bat in his right hand in what the police reported as an aggressive manner. When police told him to drop the bat, he refused. At this point, Sgt. John Preyer reportedly grabbed his right arm, the one holding the bat, but Jared still refused to put the bat down.

It took six commands before Jared finally put down the bat. After police read him his Miranda rights, Jared confessed to taking the gun, which they found in his bedroom where he had been working at filing off the serial number from the weapon.

Why were these charges dropped? Well, apparently the owner of the gun, Parries, is a convicted felon who shouldn’t have had the gun to begin with. (Still it astounds me that nothing was done about Jared at this point!)

It was shortly after this incident that Jared was expelled from Freedom High School for what school officials say was an “off-campus” incident, but police confirmed that he was expelled due to a burglary. (My guess would be this one.)

In April 2010, he was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia and marijuana. Then, of course, on August 16, Jared was arrested after his plot to blow up his high school was discovered.

Despite Jared’s many brushes with police, he was never convicted and was always released. His only consequences for his actions were to be placed on a court-ordered curfew and a police watch list.

In spite of all of the physical evidence found at Jared’s apartment, (shrapnel, plastic tubing, timing and fuse devises, his journal, and his manifesto with minute-by-minute details regarding his plan) one of his good friends, who happened to be with Jared when he was arrested, told ABC Action News in Tampa, “He wouldn’t go and do something like that. He’d say he’s going to in the heat of the moment but that’s his way of venting, I guess. I think he was just venting anger on a piece of paper.”

But experts don’t agree. They say that the degree of preparation Jared had put into his plans showed just how serious he was.

Charles A. Williams, a Drexel University psychology professor and an expert on violent youth stated, “Ninety-nine percent of the population who fantasize about harming someone because they are frustrated, or for whatever reason, don’t actually make plans to carry it out.”

Kenneth S. Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services and the school safety expert, agreed that the written plans Cano had outlined showed a “high probability” that he would have gone through with his plan. “The good news is that since Columbine we still see kids coming forward to report the threats and the plots, such as in this case,” he said.

Williams argues that Jared’s expulsion from school may have been the event that began to push him over the edge due to his sense of isolation from other people. The psychologist said that school officials or the authorities would have been wiser to enroll him in a treatment program rather than expel him from school.

“The more isolated they are, the more socially castigated they are, the more they’re cut off, they start to stew and their evil and sinister thoughts metastasize in their minds like a cancer,” he said. “The signs were all there. It was textbook.”

Trump explained that the schools’ violence prevention and security programs have been adversely affected by deep budget cuts. (Which I guess is the school’s excuse for not getting Jared in a program somewhere along the way.)

After his expulsion from Freedom High School, Jared attended a charter school which he left voluntarily in March, according to Linda Cobbe, Hillsborough County schools spokeswoman. At that point, he could choose to drop out if he wanted since he was 16. He had not currently registered to attend classes for the 2011-2012 school year, but at the time of his arrest, he was being homeschooled by his mother.

Williams is hopeful that what almost happened in Jared’s case might be a wakeup call to those who work with troubled children. “I just hope people learn from this. This is like a textbook case study that I hope prevention specialists, people involved in schools and counseling and law enforcement will look at and say, `Wow, this was really, really, really close.’”

It seems pretty clear that the ball was dropped when it came to Jared Cano. Help should have come from any one of three sources. First, his mother. I don’t know for certain that she didn’t seek help for her son, but the fact that intervention of any kind is conspicuously absent from all of the background information tells me that it is unlikely that she did. If that is true, why didn’t she seek counseling or drug rehabilitation for Jared? Clearly, he was heading for a meltdown. As a mother, I just cannot understand how she let him slip so far away without seeking professional help. In support of Jared’s mother, I imagine that she was fearful of her son, who certainly seemed to be physically and emotionally difficult to control.

Second, the school. I understand that decisions were probably made regarding expelling Jared in an effort to keep the students at Freedom High School safe. With Jared’s multiple arrests, he was definitely a loose cannon. But did the school take any steps along the way to provide counseling for Jared or to suggest to his mother that she should consider taking him to a counselor? Could the school have pushed to have him enrolled in a treatment program? Did the school do everything they could for Jared before they cut him loose? Again, I am not privy to Jared’s school records or problems that they may have had with him, but I agree that cutting him loose probably exacerbated an already bad situation.

Third, the courts. I am totally befuddled by the multiple arrests which constantly resulted in charges being dropped. If they couldn’t make any of the charges stick, why didn’t they order that he received counseling, or drug rehabilitation, or force his mother to enroll him in some kind of treatment program? If Jared could be given a court-ordered curfew, why wasn’t he also given a court-ordered intervention of some kind that might have turned this obvious downward cycle around? The pattern was clear. This boy was headed for trouble, and the legal system let him down.

Jared is due back in court on September 2. In the meantime, he is being held at the W. T. Edwards Juvenile Detention Center.

School violence, Teacher-World's Blog Charles A. Williams, Florida, Freedom High School, Jared Cano, Tampa

There is frightening news today from Tampa, Florida, of another intended attack on the first day of school foiled by a good tip and excellent police work. Here are the details which have been reported so far.

Someone, whom Police Chief Jane Castor refused to identify at this time, heard that something might be in the works and called Tampa’s 911 center to report what they knew. Officers and detectives in conjunction with the Hillsborough County school system investigated the information provided which led them to Jared Cano’s residence. Jared is a 17-year old student who has not attended his school, Freedom High School, for a year and a half due to his expulsion.

Based on this tip, on Tuesday night, police were given consent by Jared’s mother to search his home where they discovered the materials required to make pipe bombs, including a fuel source, shrapnel, plastic tubing, and timing and fusing devices. According to Castor, in addition to all of this incriminating evidence, police also found a manifesto that included a minute-by-minute timeline of Cano’s plans for August 23, the first day of school, noting specifically where he intended to plant each bomb in the Freedom High School building.

The last piece of damaging evidence was a journal with schematic drawings of some of the rooms inside the high school as well as frightening statements regarding his intent to kill.

Castor reported that Cano’s journal revealed his plan to detonate several explosive devices throughout the school. She said that the materials would have been very dangerous adding that, if Cano’s plan had been carried out, it would have resulted in serious injuries “up to and including death.”

Cano allegedly planned to kill 32 people, but was specifically targeting two administrators whose names were mentioned in his plans because he blamed them for his troubles. At this time, it appears that his plan for student casualties wasn’t as personal; he allegedly “just wanted to do something that was more spectacular than Columbine.”

Even though police found no firearms in Cano’s apartment, he had been arrested in the past for having firearms. And that’s not all! Authorities reported that 17-year old Cano has had several problems with the law and has multiple juvenile arrests. His charges include burglary, carrying a concealed weapon, altering serial numbers on a firearm, and drug possession. Incredibly, all of these charges were either dismissed or no action was taken!

And just to top off his case, when police searched his premises they also found a marijuana growing operation in his room!

On Cano’s Facebook page he says he attends the “University of Marijuana” where he studies “how to grow weed,” and his page also includes pictures of him holding a machete and drinking from a bottle of malt liquor. And he lists one of his favorite quotes as: “Lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten.” (All normal 17-year old stuff, right?)

According to the St. Petersburg Times, prosecutors said that when Cano was arrested, he verbalized his plan to discharge bombs and cause massive casualties at Freedom High School. And apparently, he wanted to speak when he appeared on Wednesday morning before the judge, but he was quickly silenced by a public defender standing next to him, who told the judge, “He has no comment.”

Tampa Police Chief Castor is confident that Cano was acting alone in this incident, as all of his plans were written in the first person, and no other names were mentioned in his journal or manifesto.

Currently, Cano faces several felony charges: possessing bomb-making materials, threatening to throw, project, place, or discharge a destructive device, cultivating marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, and possession of marijuana. 

How do I begin to wrap this one up? Well, let’s start with the positive! Huge gratitude goes out to the tipster. Your conscientious actions probably saved many lives. And more gratitude goes out to the detectives, police, and school officials who worked together to shut this evil plan down.

Now, the negative. First, how could a 17-year old have such a lengthy list of arrests for some incredibly serious infractions, such as carrying a concealed weapon and altering serial numbers on a firearm, and walk away scot-free? How does that happen? After the first few arrests, didn’t anyone realize that this boy needed some intervention or some consequences for his actions? It looks like the court system let this boy down and the community down as well by not taking his actions more seriously. And the result of their inaction could have been tragic.

Second, where was the mom throughout all of this? (I don’t know from the story if Cano’s father is in the picture or not.) Did she seek professional help for her son when he was getting in trouble with the law? Was she oblivious to the fact that her son was using drugs? Did she ever wonder what that green stuff was that was growing in his bedroom? The presence of bomb-making materials didn’t seem an odd choice for her son to have in his room? Did she care at all? Because, I’m sorry, you’d have to be pretty blind to miss all of the signals he was sending out!

Third, why didn’t Cano’s Facebook friends ever share their concerns about what he was posting on his page with an adult? Come on, kids! It is only through the grace of a tipster that you and your friends were saved from the possibility of  bombs being detonated in your high school! Wake up and speak up!

Two foiled plans to wreck havoc in U.S. schools in one summer…

That’s two plans too many. Don’t you think?

School violence, Teacher-World's Blog bomb threat, Florida, Freedom High School, Jared Cano, Tampa

In our nation, students take tests regularly to prove what they know or don’t know (if you believe that these tests actually are a true gauge of knowledge), seniors must take a test to graduate, college-bound students take SAT and ACT’s, anyone who wants to drive must take a written test and a driving test to get a license, and in many professions, you must take a test to prove you are equipped to perform that job before you can even apply for that job. But what about the most important job you will ever do in your whole life; where is the test for men and women to take that proves you are competent and prepared to be a parent?

Is it just me, or are we inundated with stories of parents who have no business being parents? I blogged recently about the 6-year old who took a loaded gun to school, now here’s an equally unbelievable story from Pensacola, Florida, of a third-grader who took her mom’s marijuana to school.

It happened last Tuesday, late in the afternoon at Lincoln Elementary School. Just before the final bell sounded, a little girl took a bag of marijuana out of her jacket pocket, showed it to the class, and announced, “This is some of my mom’s weed. It’s what my mother puts in blunts.”

Can you imagine the shock that teacher must have felt? What third-grader should even know what a blunt is, let alone have access to drugs? Irresponsibly criminal!

A phone call was made to the sheriff’s office where an investigation into how an 8-year old girl could have easy access to marijuana began. Upon arriving at the address listed at the school for this young girl, police discovered it was the home of the girl’s grandmother, who had no idea where her daughter was currently living. So that leaves you wondering if it’s the mother’s marijuana or the grandmother’s. Who’s taught this girl about blunts?

The sheriff’s office said no charges were being filed against the little girl, and no information regarding the girl’s family is being released at this time.

Deputy Chris Welborn, the spokesman for the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office said, “They’re raised in that environment. Apparently, the mother doesn’t feel that it’s wrong to use drugs in front of her child or leave the drugs lying around where the child can get a hold of them.”

When asked about this unusual situation, school superintendent Malcolm Thomas said, “Drugs are destroying the fabric of our society. They’re everywhere. They’re in every strata of income, and the devastation is pretty tough.” He further stated that their school system is being very aggressive when it comes to drugs coming into their schools. “We’ve put K-9 dogs in our schools. We sweep our schools every day. It’s a random selection of schools. We’ve conducted over 300 drug sweeps this year. We’ve only found hits 21 times,” Thomas said.

But their approach is not just reactive; it is also proactive as they try to educate students on the dangers of taking drugs. On Thursday, Thomas paid a visit to Pine Forest High School where he recognized the winner of an essay contest who wrote about the assigned topic: how to raise drug awareness in your school. (Kind of ironic timing in lieu of the awareness that was raised about drugs in this school system by the little girl from Lincoln Park Elementary, huh?)

Thomas was quick to stress that drug awareness can’t just be a school matter; incidents like the one that occurred at Lincoln Park Elementary need to be prevented at home. “Parents have to step up. They have to take responsibility and they need to be aware. Not only of the substances they may be using in their home, but also the language they’re using around their children because we’re teaching them. We’re teaching them in the home and we’re teaching them in the school. And I’m afraid, in some of the homes, we’re teaching the wrong thing,” Thomas said.

Amen! Parents, if you are going to have children, take on the difficult job of being a real parent, and that involves sacrificing your wants and needs for the wants and needs of your child. It involves teaching them right from wrong and showing them, through your own life, the difference between the two.

It’s not easy signing on for parenthood, but it is the only job that brings the rewards that touch your heart and fill your life with a sense of accomplishment and love that will last forever.

Teacher-World's Blog Add new tag, Florida, Lincoln Elementary School, marijuana, Pensacola

What happens when a parent takes matters into their own hands to address a bullying problem on a school bus? Nothing good, as far as I can tell. Let me tell you about two rather recent events of this kind looking at the similarities and the differences between the two cases.

You may recall this past September watching a video of a father, James Jones, who boarded a Florida Seminole County school bus to confront the students who had been harassing his daughter. It was a sad case of a sixth-grade girl who suffers from cerebral palsy and was bullied daily on her ride to and from school. The month-long ordeal included pinching, hitting, taunting, and even throwing unwrapped condoms in her hair.

On September 3, Jones, who had had enough, boarded his daughter’s bus and, with profuse profanity, threatened the students his daughter claimed were bullying her. He also threatened the bus driver. Jones was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct as well as disturbing a school function.

The incident, which was extremely volatile, was captured on the bus’s video. As I watched the video, I had several thoughts. My initial reaction was that this dad was way out of control and very scary. Amazingly though, you could hear the children on that bus laughing when he began yelling at the bus driver. Their reaction confirmed for me that these are pretty tough kids who found the whole situation amusing, leading me to believe they were guilty of the bullying this father was there to address.

My other thought, as I listened to the father, was how frustrated and powerless he really felt. His ranting was clearly out of sheer frustration that he was unable to protect his daughter when she wasn’t with him. This is every parent’s nightmare; to have to send your child off to school each day knowing they are going to be bullied. It has me questioning whether I might not lose control myself if my own daughter was the one being bullied in this reprehensible manner.

Sadly, the bullying continued even after Jones’s threats and his daughter had to be hospitalized in order to be placed on suicide watch.

More recently, on April 7, in the same county in Florida, Laura Booker was arrested when she tried to talk to her 13-year old daughter’s bus driver about the bullying she claims she is dealing with on her school bus from both the students and the bus driver. According to Kaila Booker, even though she reported the constant name calling she faced from other students on the bus, the bus driver was unwilling to intercede on her behalf and even implied that she was “ghetto” herself.

Again, this incident was captured on video, but this video is decidedly different. It shows a frustrated but rational mother trying to discuss her concerns with the bus driver, who immediately becomes adversarial. This time, it is the bus driver’s behavior which is threatening, not the parent’s. As I watched the video, I felt that his behavior was excessive, leading me to question his honesty in this matter.

I’m sure that this bus driver felt uncomfortable due to Booker’s accusations, but she expressed to him that she was trying to get his side of the story. Had he taken the time to calmly tell his side of the story instead of calling her daughter a liar, ordering Booker off the bus, threatening to call the police, and finally, calling the police, perhaps the outcome might have been different.

Let me first say, I don’t think that confronting a bus driver in front of students on a bus is the best way of dealing with a situation like this. It places them in a position of having to defend themselves in front of kids, which is not appropriate.

It is equally inappropriate to involve kids in a confrontation of this nature. Thirteen is an age when kids worry so much about appearances. I can’t imagine Kaila being thrilled by this scene, especially watching her mom being tackled to the ground and hauled away by the police. And this mom just gave these bullies a whole lot of ammunition for future harassment! 

Booker stated that she was frustrated since the school system had done nothing to address her concerns. It is unfortunate that the principal did not suggest a meeting with the bus driver, the principal, and Booker so that this matter could have been addressed more appropriately. A more private meeting might have led to a more amicable solution to this problem, saving both the school and the Booker family the embarrassment that this altercation has cost both parties.

“There’s nothing worse than knowing that something is happening to your child and the very people that are supposed to help are not helping,” said Booker. “Anytime someone is picking on someone consistently to where the person is feeling targeted, they’re feeling harassed, they’re feeling frustrated, they’re feeling they don’t know what to do. To me, that’s a form of bullying. When a grown man is bullying a 13-year-old child, it’s time for a mother to step in if the people who should be stepping in don’t step in.”

Herein lies the major similarity between both of these stories; these two parents had reached such a sense of frustrated powerlessness that they reacted in a way that is normally foreign to them for the safety and well-being of their children. The people whose job it is to serve and protect these parents’ children failed to do their job, so Jones and Booker decided to do their job for them.

Appropriate? Not at all! Normal behavior? Absolutely not! But neither is bullying, and yet it too often remains unaddressed. Deal with the bullying, administrators! Parents have a right to expect their children will be safe and protected in their schools and on their school buses. And if that right is taken from them, schools better be ready for the embarrassing fall-out!

Bullying, Teacher-World's Blog Bullying, Florida, James Jones, Laura Booker, Seminole County

Well, it finally happened! What I have feared since the first moment I heard the words “merit pay for teachers”: the linking of merit pay to student test scores. Now that the cat is out of the bag, don’t think we have heard the last of it. Let’s look at what happened in Florida over the past two weeks.

First, the bitter: the Florida legislature voted for merit pay for their teachers. Now that may not seem so bitter until you listen to what they approved, which was that half of a teacher’s salary in Florida (according to news coverage) would be based on their students’ test scores. And if this wasn’t bad enough, teachers would only be offered one-year contracts. This would obviously allow teachers to be non-renewed if their students do not perform as expected. And forget about tenure which teachers earned by putting in years of faithful service to their profession and taking classes. Wow! I could go on for hours and bore you to death as I repeat all of the reasons why this is just crazy, but I won’t because, if you know anything about teaching, you understand a teacher’s inability to control all of the outside factors that can interfere with good test scores.

Now, the sweet: Governor Charlie Crist, Florida’s republican governor, turned his back on political prudence, and voted down the legislation after spending significant time listening to teachers express their outrage and their legitimate concerns over the ramifications of such a proposal for both teachers and students. Apparently, one of the deciding factors for him was a conversation he had with a friend from St. Petersburg who called him to ask how such a bill would impact his special needs child and his child’s teacher. And that is a huge consideration, because if this had become a law, who would want to risk their salary and possibly their career by taking on a co-teaching classroom or work with the special education population? And that is only one of the many huge reasons why merit pay linked solely to test scores is dead wrong! So, thank you Governor Crist, for bringing sanity to this highly charged issue.

Finally, the bitter again: Don’t think this is over! Now that this ugly topic has been breached, don’t think we won’t hear it again. Even though we have heard the countless assurances that merit pay would be based on a myriad of factors, politicians will continue to advocate and push for linking merit pay solely to test scores, and eventually, it will pass somewhere. When that day comes, we should all hang our heads in sorrow that what was once considered an honorable profession has been corrupted by politicians who have little to no understanding of the real issues teachers face in classrooms today, and who think they can impose business-like regulations on a profession that should never operate like a business.

Hats off to the teachers in Florida who forcefully raised their voices for teachers everywhere! We all need to take a lesson from them and start speaking up now before it is too late!

Changes in Teaching, Merit Pay for Teachers, special education, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog Florida, Governor Crist, Merit Pay for Teachers, test scores