February 29, 2016
One small leap day for mankind. Or this guy.
Ten years ago today, well, leap year 2/29/16, while teaching vulnerable teens at my riot-marred, drugs-and-gun-toting hellhole (objectively speaking), St. Paul’s Como Park High School, I posted, “Anyone care to explain to me the school-to-prison pipeline my colleagues and I have somehow created, or perpetuated, or not done enough to interrupt? [If not], you seriously owe us real teachers an apology. Actually, an apology won’t cut it.” Then I explained what ruined adult authority. “Phone and iPad devices, used for social media and gaming. There have always been rules for devices, and defined levels of misconduct. Since we now have no backup, no functional location to send kids who won’t quit gaming, setting up fights, selling drugs, [pulling] whoring trains, or cyber bullying, we’re screwed.” Whoring train referred to an incident, so-called by kids, with our school football team lining up, and paying for blowjobs.
Then my Como Park coworker, Kristy Pierce, a behavior aide, reported me. Black Lives Matter head, Rashad Turner’s own mother, Viola Turner, chimed in too. Later, another behavior aide, Chauntyll Allen, called me a racist on recorded mic at the
district board of education. She posted a thread of smoke including that her boss met me (false, she’d never seen nor met me), and “Should have seen the look on his” [my] face” when told I would be at her school. (How did that happen ?😝)
St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Josh Verges texted that he mined my blog and gave it to lone black school board member Keith Hardy, whereupon it ended up in the hands of Black Lives Matter.
My co-teacher was a black woman, Katrina Jacoway. My principal, Theresa Neal, a black woman. My special education administrator, Alecia Mobley, black woman. My assistant superintendent, Theresa Battle, a black woman. It might seem all my friction came from black folks, but any scan of my 300+ image gallery on this topic would show that most interested parties were white folks.
It was no fun having my boss’s boss’s boss clack down the hall to my room, point her finger at me, and pull me from my job.
Suspended but allowed to substitute teach for the remainder of the year, St. Paul put me through Beyond Diversity™ training developed by San Francisco’s Glenn Singleton, for the second time. Having been told by school to speak to no one or face firing, and by my union attorney, Meg Luger, that my writing was racist, I said nothing. I tried to believe that it was immediate, local, and personal, and I would eventually get over it. No idea it was never personal, local or immediate. Fox called. CBSLocal TV and radio called, NBC and ABC affiliates, and reporters out east.
Anyway, I had my walk of shame and infamy. License suspended by the state, then reinstated. Career ended. Couldn’t sue because my attorney got me to sign a paper, under extreme duress in July 2016. Now, if a smarter attorney were able to vacate that decision, given by weak counsel, if any attorney had filed an harassment restraining order against my stalkers, it might have ended my siege mentality sooner. If talking to 25 attorneys, to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or the ACLU had yielded just one ambitious lawyer up to the task of vacating that pressurized decision, I might’ve recovered a bit, been made whole, as they say. If I’d taken the interviews offered, if national Fox’s or the NYTimes’ own interviews of me had turned into stories, if my own written piece had been published by Quillette or by Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which stated interested for weeks, I might have gotten word out to more potential readers of my then-blog or this Substack.
You don’t want to be choked by some injustice forever, you just want one editor’s bites to land a story; maybe a footnote of recognition; that you were there before the panic; George Floyd was the last big boom; you were there in 2015 when Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, at Yale were screamed at and she was forced to resign over Halloween costumes; when this tidal wave of race hoaxes swept over America because of fake victims, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, and no one cared about Tony Timpa; you were there when St. Paul violated children’s right to disability services; you were there half a year before Bill C-16 on compelled speech in Toronto that introduced us to Jordan Peterson; you were there a year before Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were driven out of Evergreen; that was a hell of a long time ago.
And you got out. That will have to do. Pictures like the liar Chauntyll Allen getting arrested for invading a church service will have to do.
Thank you for the powerful retrospective / review.
So sorry you went through all that.