Sometimes karma makes itself known in quiet but certain ways, even if it takes its time.
In spite of my having won my district court case that proved my dismissal in 2009 was not based on my performance, but on my advocacy for GLBT students in the school district and the desire to silence the message by removing the messenger, and then having that decision upheld in the court of appeals, I was not so naive as to assume the harassment would end and the administrators who had been embarrassed by the whole thing would be accepting of reality.
After all, the advocacy did not die, as it had been expected to, when the first request to have the presence of GLBT students and their needs covered in professional development programs for teachers as was done for other groups to which students belonged such as Hispanic, Asian, and Black, with the first dismissive refusal, and as time went on and it became progressively clearer that those who opposed this and openly including GLBT students in policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination were more concerned with justifying their reluctance than to doing what was right.
The stronger their reluctance, the more foolish they began to look, and being called out had become unacceptable for them.
If they could vilify the messenger, they could cover their own bigotry.
The attempt to dismiss was to have followed the usual track. The teacher would be told about the impending public dismissal hearing with the offer that a quiet exit would prevent it; the dismissal, during which the teacher is not allowed to defend himself and at which any favorable evidence is under the control of the administrator’s attorney who could weed out anything that contradicted the charges, is held in public to embarrass the teacher; the offer to leave quietly after the hearing, something that teachers accepted so that the record of the whole procedure would be expunged and the teacher could find employment elsewhere.
But in this case, more than the teacher’s career was at stake, so the quiet acceptance of a false fate was out of the question, and instead of the usual happening, the administration was forced to prove its case before a District Court judge with no control over the evidence presented.
Their desperation was made clear by the attempt to find any way to avoid following the decision of the court, going so far as to face contempt charges, and then filing an appeal to the ruling only to lose in the appellate court.
Instead of allowing me to return to the position I held at the school at which I held it, I was sent to a failing school that was facing receivership, a procedure that included the district losing control of a school to the state, and the teachers being dismissed because of their failure.
It was only too obvious that, in spite of my being new to the school, I faced the judgment of incompetence along with the other teachers who had been there for years, and the plan to prove the first claim of my incompetence was to be proven by my implied incompetent at yet another school. Not only could I have not been responsible for the failure at that school as I had only arrived there in October and decision of the school’s fate was made by April, but, in spite of receiving positive evaluations on my performance in writing, somehow the summary report of my performance claimed I had never been even satisfactory in my performance. This went against the written evaluations that it was assumed, for some reason, I had no copies of.
So that plan failed.
Rather than being sent away from the district, I was sent to another struggling school.
And here is where some Karmic events began to come together.
Sadly, when I arrived at Frederick Douglass High School, it did not take long to see the educational abuse that was taking place.
Instead of challenging the students to work for real achievement, they were being led to believe that what they were doing was producing the desired level of achievement. The students were basically being used to give the appearance of school success, while there was no substance behind the smoke.
I found, and my documentation was later instrumental in proving the assertion by some alumni, that they were not being properly educated. They were victims of the principal’s desire to be loved by his having their grades and attendance doctored to make it appear his educational approach and methodologies were successful, and creating an atmosphere where the principal was the students’ friend while teachers, who had high standards and required students take control of their education by putting forth the effort to bring about true success, were the enemy as they were presented as willfully ignoring the student’s greatness, and this resulted in creating adversarial attitudes of students toward teachers.
The students would run to the principal, he would make them feel better by agreeing with them, and then he would discipline that mean ol’ teacher in a very public way so the students would love him more.
The students were being misled about their progress and supported in their refusal to do basic work as what they were doing seemed sufficient enough, and the falsified and doctored attendance and grades made the principal appear to be effective.
I taught English to all the seniors, and, in spite of it being obvious that they had difficulty reading and most were unable to write a coherent paragraph, all my classes were labelled “Honors English”.
Why strive to attain the title if it was simply bestowed?
One student that I had never seen in class graduated that year with near perfect attendance and with an A in my class. She was one of the students who later filed for an investigation because, having been happy at the time with besting the system, she found, when she had to face the post high school realities, that she actually lacked the basic skills needed at the community college that she had been led to believe she had.
Not accepting what was happening, and making my displeasure known, I was placed on a boiler plate plan of improvement that was handed to over half the teachers at the school regardless of their subject matter, the one commonality shared by them being having high standards in their classes to which the students objected because they were suddenly not allowed to simply sail through their non-education.
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There was this horrible attitude expressed through the principal’s actions that the students were not capable of real education or acceptable social behavior, apparently because they did not have the abilities to actually learn, so the appearance of success was what they would get.
This school was on the North East side of the city, the quadrant in which the majority of Blacks had lived because of Jim Crow, and the students were predominantly Black.
Oh, it did have great sports teams whose members were treated like heroes who were not allowed to fail even if they did not work as that would affect their eligibility to play, and who got more praise than those who exhibited academic success.
Ironically the school was described by its namesake in his autobiography:
“They had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings”
A plan for improvement is the first step in the dismissal process. It became clear that having accomplished what I had, having the GLBT students openly covered in school district policies, there was no need beyond stubbornness to stay in the district and fight a manufactured battle.
For the next four years I lived on Cape Cod, during which time documentation on altered grades and attendance, as well as copies of emails that revealed the Principal’s attitudes and supported my impressions on his looks-over-substance attitude that I had saved and which I supplied to those who had called for the investigation of that principal at Douglass were helpful in his removal and hopefully ending the patronizing of the students that hurt rather than helped them.
But as Cape Cod is expensive, I moved to New Bedford which is more reasonable.
Through a series of events and coincidental encounters, I found myself involved in the history of the city, becoming friends with the head of the New Bedford Historical Society whose headquarters are in the Nathan and Polly Johnson House that was the first home of many self emancipated men, women, and children who had arrived in New Bedford from the South before full emancipation after the Civil War.
This was the house in which Frederick Douglass changed his name from the one connected to his days in bondage. It was also the house in which he lived with his wife until he was successful enough to purchase his own home.
Not only is my apartment just three block from the Johnson House and Abolition Row, a stretch of Seventh Street where the homes of the leaders of the Abolition Movement were, but also two blocks from where Douglass had earned his first pay as a freeman, and on the same street where the first home he owned was located, a location I pass as I walk to the New Bedford Whaling Museum on my volunteer days.
In preparation for the construction of Abolition Park located at the North end of Abolition Row, I took part in an archeological dig on the property where two houses once stood, one of which was used as a school to teach self emancipated children, to uncover any historical artifacts before construction was to begin.
My connection with Frederick Douglass now involved places where he had lived, given speeches, and made his initial living, and living in the neighborhood we would have shared but for the years between.
In honor of his 200th birthday and the last steps to the beginning of Abolition Park’s construction, the local newspaper published a Black History month insert, and one of the pictures in it was of me at the archeological dig with my name included. I had also taken part in the community reading of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography on the occasion of his 200th birthday, and the magazine contained a photo of the event taken from the balcony with me sitting in the audience.
Later, on July 4, I took part in the community reading of Douglass’s 1852 speech, ” The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro”, held in the Seamen’s Bethel made famous in Moby Dick.
My experience at his namesake school was anything but pleasant, and here I was not only involved in things related to Douglass, but as the newspaper insert, both digital and hard copy, will be archived, my connection to the real Frederick Douglass will be timeless.
It is as if I got the message that I had done right by the school that bears his name, and that he accepts me as a friend.
He had once written:
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe”.
It may have taken a while, and it may have involved an experience at his namesake school that put me in a position to help right a wrong even after I was no longer there, but now I have found myself in his space in New Bedford where I have become immersed directly with him, and by extension other self emancipated peers of his as, while transcribing whale ship crew lists from the first half of the 19th Century at the New Bedford Whaling museum, I am encountering the names of his peers and the fathers of his peers, and fellow abolitionists.
And, I am in that magazine that celebrates his time in New Bedford.