By Request: A Report From The "Front Lines" (My Teaching Experience And Bullying/Autistic Students,

Bullying

Many teachers are subjected to continuous bullying to the point that their souls are slaughtered and emotional survival rather than children’s needs, becomes their priority. They slide down the slippery slope of compromise as they attempt to salvage any sense of self, dodging parents’ need to know the truth, knowing it is political suicide to put a child’s needs over an administrative agenda.

Cheryl Mix is a teacher who refused to compromise her integrity. She reported the school’s noncompliance of Special Education Laws to the Office of Civil Rights and shortly thereafter, she was written up as unsatisfactory and her contract was not renewed. She protested publicly, and the district reported her to the Department of Children and Family Services for child abuse.

She no longer has a classroom. Score one for the administration; score minus one magnificent teacher for the children.

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"One of the worst affected professions is education, which possesses peculiar pressures in addition to the usual circumstances, which stimulate bullying."

"Bullying, especially on a regular basis and for the perpetrator’s pleasure, can be regarded as a form of psychological rape because of its intrusive and violational nature. Bypassing or piercing the outer defences of assertiveness and behaviour skills, the inner-self is penetrated by a regular and unrelenting trespass of threat, intimidation,provocation and guilt."

"I was bullied severely over a period of three years and eventually dismissed on a trumped up charge. The dismissal and appeal hearing were a foregone conclusion. A year later, having been let down repeatedly by the legal system, I still feel like I’ve been accused of a crime whilst the real criminals are off gallivanting about, probably bullying someone else. My only 'crime'was to take pride in and enjoy my job."

Tim Field, Bully in Sight

I have been following this discussion for some time and am
deeply touched and moved by the high degree of passion and
pain contained and expressed in the remarks.

Having taught in the NYC public schools system for over
four decades, since 1968, I can say that the entire system
is corrupt to the core. I am now involved in two lawsuits
in the Federal Courts, which contain evidentiary documents
regarding these remarks.

I was a highly decorated NYC Educator but once I became a
Whistle-blower I immediately rose to the top of the
system's "hit list" in 2003 and the NYC schools system has
been trying to bury me ever since.

There is no depth to which the NYC schools system will not
sink once it decides to destroy a Teacher's career - and
this is a nation wide situation and phenomenon.

On Sunday, March 21, the NEW YORK POST, on page 8,
published a statement about me that I had been "charged
with sexual misconduct".

This is an absolute bald faced lie and knowing
fabrication.

Where do you think the two NY POST reporters got the idea
and this libelous false information to include in their
March 21 story ? If your IQ is above 10 you likely
guessed correctly.

Obviously the NY POST will pay dearly for this Libel.

The point is, for those poor babes in the woods, still wet
behind the ears, you have as much chance fighting the
egregiously corrupt public school systems in America as my
Grandmother's sister's family had hiding in the woods in
Russia as the Nazi killing squads came barreling through
the countryside, raping and murdering during the
Holocaust. She, like most, did not survive.

For those who believe the analogy is overly dramatic, wait
until your number comes up and it is decided it is time
for you to go. Wait till the system causes you to lose
everything, your career, your house, the ability to feed
your family, your health insurance, your economic security
in old age- literally everything that one needs and
requires to sustain a normal life and remain a viable
human being.

I salute those and praise the courage of all those
Teachers in NYC and nationwide who have refused to go down
without a fight. But all such fighters for their simple
human dignity and employment rights should know that the
deck and all the odds are stacked against you.

You are battling forces that violate the Laws of the land
everywhere and all the time and usually succeed in getting
away with doing so.

Will they succeed in my case/s ? I have spent a fortune
and will continue to do so to make burying me and my
career as costly for them as possible.

I could have retired long ago at a Pension far larger than
my current contractual salary, after 42 years as a NYC
Teacher. (The contractual salary the system has been
illegally refusing to pay me since October of 2009.)

But I refuse to retire until my State Education Law 3020-a
Teacher trial concludes and the Hearing Officer, a highly
respected State Arbitrator and Attorney, who is
unswervingly honest, has rendered his Decision in this
trial that includes the charge that I "brought a plant to
the school without Official permission". Believe it or
not!!

Again, to all those Teachers who have refused to go
meekly, like lambs to the slaughter, I salute your courage
and your passion to defend your simple human dignity and
your careers.

My Grandmother's family did not survive their battle
against unspeakeable odds. But that is no reason for
American Teachers or for any human beings on this Earth to
capitulate to evil just because the odds are against them.

In the end that is what differentiates one human being
from the next. The individual who goes along to get
along, and the individual who has the courage of his/her
convictions who cannot be bought at any price.

Indeed, in the end, if one's only goal is to just to
survive at any cost, then what is the point. Sometimes
sheer survival can come at such a cost to one's dignity as
a human being, it is not worth the price.

Chairman Quall and members of the House Education Committee, Do you know what Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder (PDSD) is? It is a psychological condition that is a near-cousin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an issue for our soldiers; PDSD is an issue for the victims (and relatives of victims) of bullying. Just as a backfiring engine can trigger a PTSD episode for a soldier, so a perceived “return to the battlefield” can induce a PDSD episode. That is precisely what happened at the close of the Education Committee hearing Friday morning. Being “lost in the paperwork”, being dismissed and ignored, triggered a flashback to the “dark days” of being bullied at my former school. Another word for “flashback” is “revivication”, reliving the event. As I rose to object to being ignored, I was reliving the bullying that I experienced at MMS, my former school. You saw a clear example of the lasting effects of bullying on the victim. That is precisely my point. It doesn’t matter whether the victim is a child or an adult; bullying causes long-term psychological, physiological and behavioral damage. Period. The Legislature has the power to begin to stop all bullying in the schoolhouse. What are you going to DO about it?

I am sorry if I disturbed the decorum of the hearing, but you may understand our (victims) position on adult bullying after you read further. This is, necessarily, a long letter. I apologize, but if you are to have an informed discussion and make an informed decision, you need to know what life is like for the victim. Please be assured that I am only giving you the highlights; there is much more detail to this story. Of the many bullying weapons used against us by the principal and his mob at MMS, one of the most widespread was ignoring us and our input with a frequent dismissive, “that’s just your perspective,” with a sneer in the voice. The quality curriculum that we senior staffers presented to students was marginalized and limited (my wife and I routinely mentored students to placements at the Washington State National History Day exhibit-we had one student take first place in her category and qualify to go to nationals in Washington, D.C. in 2005); less rigorous curriculum presented by younger staff was highly praised. Then there was the “silent treatment” where the office manager would not speak to us (preferring a facial sneer that said, “you are less that trash”) or provide professional services until we started the conversation and responded with as few words as she could, which were delivered as if we were the scum of the earth (or she would sneer at us that she was busy and she’d put it in our mail box later, as if we had interrupted her important work with our totally unimportant work). We were not called on during faculty meetings unless it couldn’t be helped otherwise. When we were allowed to speak, all of our suggestions and input were met with derision. In light of this treatment, perhaps you can see how not being allowed to speak to the Committee after driving all the way from Richland would be upsetting and trigger a flashback.

The basis of bullying is an imbalance of power. Whether children or adults, the more “powerful” may try to dominate, even humiliate, the weaker. Teachers in a bullying situation take a lot of garbage. Here are a few more examples, none of which happened to me but rather to others in my building. The run-on sentence structure is used in a deliberate attempt to evoke anxiety in the reader, just as the bullying does. You are assigned 39 students for your Japanese language (talk about rigorous curriculum!) elective (you are about to become a KCTS9 Golden Apple winner), but you only have 32 chairs and 33 books and have mentioned this in passing to another teacher and the next day you received word of your award and the principal pulls you into his office and you think that he will praise you for your accomplishment but he and the counselor yell at you for complaining in public about not having enough books. Or: you notice that three days after the resignation of another senior staffer (in early October!), the principal begins to behave oddly toward you and within a week is openly committing bullying acts toward you (serial bullies do that-get rid of one target then focus on the next one on the list). Or: the principal decides that your years-long successful for-high-school-credit (the only one in the district) biology class has to have 27 students in it even though you only chose 19 through your selective process which assures that all students will be able to keep up with the advanced work load (you are a KCTS9 Golden Apple nominee and winner of a Toyota grant that allows your honors students to hook up to a NASA data stream), so he assigns 8 students that you have previously turned down and 7 of them fail your class even though you gave up your lunch period for two trimesters to tutor them AND THEN the principal blames YOU for their failure and calls you a bad teacher in front of your peers. Or: the principal warns you, as a senior staff member, that you need to be in your room in the morning to monitor the students and help them with their work (but don’t forget to read and respond to all of your e-mails!) while the junior staff members sit in the faculty room drinking coffee and eating donuts. Or: you go to the principal with a clarifying question about implementation of the new online grade book and he goes ballistic, yelling at you, pointing his finger at you, telling you, “I don’t like your attitude!” and when you try to withdraw from the situation, he yells, “No, we’re going to take care of this right now!”, threatening you with the reminder “Don’t forget that I’m your evaluator” AND he yells and threatens you in the same way one month later in the presence of the vice principal who seems appalled and you invoke your Weingarten rights to have a union rep present and the principal refuses and continues to yell at you until you insist on representation at which point he finally disengages. Or: five behavior disordered students (all boys) are assigned to your last period class when both you and they are at low energy points and you have a daily struggle with discipline and the rest of the class is not learning because you are spending most of your time disciplining these five students and halfway through the year you find out that the counselor had left specific instructions the previous summer that these five boys should NEVER be assigned to a class with any other of the five and the ONLY other person with scheduling authority is the principal. There is more; so much more. Why do teachers put up with this? Because the principal has all the power and they have none. We were told by an upper level administrator that the principal can talk to you anytime, anywhere, and in any manner that they see fit and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is a well known axiom in the teaching profession that the principal is God and that running afoul of him/her can mean being subjected to bullying. It is education’s dirty little secret.

How can this be corrected? Where is the power to stop this? Only in the Legislature. I ask again, “What are YOU going to DO?”