(This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of a court case whose final effect would benefit GLBT students in Oklahoma City OK)

 

The usual and unchallenged result of a teacher rightfully or wrongfully dismissed from the Oklahoma City Public Schools district was that the teacher just went quietly away either due to the embarrassment or because they accepted the district’s offer that going quietly would result in anything negative in their file and any record of the dismissal hearing and vote would vanish and they could get a job elsewhere.

This made it obvious that some dismissals, at least, were contrived merely to have a teacher go away because they did not mesh with an administrator no matter how good of a teacher they were.

Sometimes, politics and opening a position for a friend, relative, or someone more malleable was the motivation.

With dismissals going unchallenged administrators were emboldened to remove teachers for very unsupportable reasons.

In my case, I could not become another Gay teacher, who was advocating for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender students, somehow being drummed out of the corps for trumped up reasons, and so I had taken the unique step of calling for a Trial de Novo to counter my dismissal.

Between what would be proven in court as my wrongful dismissal from the Oklahoma City Public Schools district and the District Court trial that would prove that, I spent the summer in town so that I would be available to answer my attorneys’ questions, find and deliver documents that might be needed,  and attend the various depositions. Since we entered summer with no definite date for the Trial de Novo we filed for, I was afraid to go anywhere for any length of time as I may have had to get back to town as soon as possible. This could be both inconvenient and expensive.

Unlike the Board hearing where district policy required I hand over all evidence in my favor to the administrators’ attorney so she could rule out anything that supported me and contradicted my accusers, a rather prejudiced procedure that guaranteed any teacher would be found deserving of dismissal without question, the district had no such control in court.

It seemed that each time my attorneys asked if I had a particular document I came across others neither they nor I remembered I had, but which turned out to be extremely helpful.

In their depositions each administrator laid responsibility for any mistakes on each other. Since they were deposed separately they had no idea of this among themselves.

The superintendent’s deposition was short, and because he went far beyond what was actually asked by my attorney, we got a glimpse into his thinking process and management style. He considered himself the “Lead Teacher”, and would prefer to be thought of in that light in spite of his deposition showing he seemed more attuned to whatever administrators told him than in giving his time to actually listening to teachers. Below him were his deputies, Area Directors, Principals, and then Assistant Principals, and they reported up the chain of command, and, based on the assumption that they were honest and had no ulterior motives, by the time anything got to him, he didn’t question anything he was told. He naively accepted whatever he was told by them as true.

He never spoke to the other side in any serious matter.

Asked if classroom observations were always objective, his response was that they had better be or the district could be in real trouble.

When my lawyer asked this he did so because the assistant principal, my evaluator, in her deposition a few days prior to his had admitted that my termination was a predetermined conclusion before any evaluation of my teaching as made and the questionable Plan of Improvement had been issued, and that she had decided she would gather any information that would support the need for my dismissal. This obviously meant that she had ignored anything supporting me as a good and effective teacher.

Her answers also exposed that the actions she had taken that led to the recommendation that I be dismissed were not actually her own, but those she was being directed to take by someone else. That person would turn out to be the administrators’ attorney, the person who had limited and prevented what evidence in my favor was allowed at my dismissal hearing before the school board the previous May.

As her deposition session was winding up and her guard was down, my attorney asked one last, seemingly throw away informal question.

Prostate Enlargement- Prostate Enlargement, a normal part of the growing child’s http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/1482311037_add_file_6.pdf viagra price exploration of his or her body. However, simply for fun, if you take best prices on sildenafil pill then you would surely be able to get strong state of male reproductive organ. Sip the drug wholly means as shop for viagra cheap it is. You may even find that your financial advisor or accountant may be of considerable help at this point as they are suggested as per their body type and how badly the http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/1482461379_add_file_1.pdf cialis prices problem has affected the person. Since at the end of the school year before the one that resulted in the recommendation for my dismissal my students’ test scores were above expectations, and during that year I had also been assigned a student teacher to mentor who was hired to teach at the school the following year, my attorney was curious how I could go from these two successes to being  such a bad teacher over the summer break who needed to be told how to approach my classes by a former Gym teacher and a former Typing teacher with no evidence their methods were better than my proven ones. So, as people were putting away legal pads and preparing to leave, he asked when it had been decided that steps would be taken to have me dismissed.

The vice-principal answered that that decision had been made before the school year had begun, and long before my first evaluation.

It was clear the dismissal had been orchestrated.

All the eyes around the conference table at which both sides were seated grew huge.

The superintendent was not interested in a teacher’s past performance which, in my case, could have been used to show that, if it could be believed, somehow in the summer break between June and August of 2008, suddenly and without warning I had somehow become the most incompetent teacher in the district based on the amount of time and money that would be spent to dismiss me after having had the successful year with  my students’ performance on the End of Instruction tests that spring.

A simple inspection of this sudden change would have shown clearly something was not reasonable here, but how a teacher was performing, or was said to be, in the present was all that counted to the superintendent, even though at the time of the assistant principal’s decision to have me dismissed prior to observing my teaching performance, it was also a “now”. How a teacher was doing now was, to his way of thinking, unquestionably and honestly reported by the chain of command. He assumed, because an administrator assured him that any Plan for Improvement was designed for the benefit of helping a slipping teacher, or one having a bad year, such plans were always reasonable and fair, and honestly arrived at.

These assumptions would evaporate during the trial as uncensored evidence, not allowed at the dismissal hearing, would be presented, evidence I had actually given to him when I realized what was happening, but which he chose to ignore.

The Regional Area Director‘s deposition was an attempt to make sure any blame for any erroneous act fell squarely on other people. She remembered very little of the events in which she played a part, and continually claimed to assume that anything that was done was done by others.

When the principal and the vice-principal, my evaluator, were questioned, it became apparent that my major”transgression”, besides advocating for GLBT students, was that I taught English so that the students did well on all state and government tests, but I didn’t use the methods my principal,  the former middle school gym teacher who had never taught English nor at a high school, thought would work. I, on the other hand, had had test scores at the top of the scale, and, so, I had stuck with what worked, rather than stop doing that in favor of what might work. The principal had read an educational  methodology book and wanted me to run my class according to that one book.

It was up to how this information and the complete evidence would be presented at trial now.

The time between the depositions and the trial was a busy and trying time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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