Here's a quick excerpt from the Miami Herald, followed by my thoughts.
Excerpt: Fed up with what they view as another blow to a suffering school community, about 60 teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High protested the sudden reassignment of three assistant principals and the campus security specialist.
Teachers donning their signature maroon #MSDSTRONG shirts lined up in front of the school marquee early Tuesday morning. Some brought handwritten posters reading, “Respect teachers’ agency,” and “Who is this helping?” and began chants with “Bring them back!”
They received notice at an impromptu meeting Monday afternoon that assistant principals Jeff Morford, Winfred Porter and Denise Reed and school security specialist Kelvin Greenleaf will be reassigned to district sites following the findings of a state panel created to investigate the school shooting that left 17 dead and 17 injured on Valentine’s Day. The district did not provide any further information.
“If these people were such a problem, why didn’t they pull them out at the beginning of the school year?” asked American history teacher Gregory Pittman.
Experts at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission hearing two weeks ago testified that Greenleaf and Morford were said to have entered the security camera room approximately 7 minutes and 15 seconds after the first shot was fired. They relayed what they saw on video for the next 30 minutes, and at one point mentioned it was a delayed feed to Porter, who was in charge of security, and former school resource officer Scot Peterson, who later resigned.
But no one told police the feed was delayed. The confusion led to law enforcement officers searching for Cruz when he had, in fact, already fled the campus.
Bottom Line: Ironically enough I teed up this topic yesterday but for the complete opposite reason of why faculty at Stoneman Douglas were protesting. I think it’s absurd that administrators who so woefully failed their responsibilities to students in a literal time of life and death should’ve been held accountable for their failures rather than simply “reassigned”. These protesting employees think they shouldn’t have even had to deal with being be reassigned.
Once again, how concerned does that make you about what these educators are projecting in the classroom? Yikes. But even that conversation is separate from what I want to focus on here. At what point have walkouts gotten out of control in our schools? If school faculty now conducts walkouts are the inmates now running the asylum? Seriously.
All school employees work for us, the taxpayers. Some of us who don’t have kids in these schools are already ripped off regardless for having to pay for schools we’ll never use. For those who do send their children to these schools, the premise is obtaining an education. That’s not achieved when the educators walk out of the classroom to protest. That’s the literal antithesis of what they’re tasked with doing.
What’s worse is that increasingly the children themselves are emboldened to walk out of classrooms disrupting the education process and at worst placing the children these faculties are tasked with supervising in harm's way. Kids being kids is one thing. Adults abusing the public's trust, violating their responsibilities and placing kids at risk is reprehensible.
Now more than ever before school choice is needed.
Photo by: Joe Raedle/Getty Images