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

Ten years ago today the trial began.

The actual Trial de Novo, which had been scheduled for three days, would only last two.

On the first day I sat and squirmed as I listened to one administrator after another say the worst possible things about me as a professional and a person, and my unease was only relieved by my attorney reminding me we still had to present our case and could cross examine the administrators about their testimony.

The administration repeated its claims made at the dismissal hearing back in May, and acted as if what they had to say would go unchallenged.

The testimony of those two days can be summed up in this way:

After thirteen years as a teacher in the district, eight of them at the high school, I only began receiving poor evaluations and a series of odd reprimands after I had objected to the actions of the administrator who had interfered with two students who had signed up to speak to the School Board about the need to add GLBT students to district policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination, and why this as important.

The vice-principal, my evaluator, had made many errors on the evaluations leading to the recommendation for dismissal among them adding a negative mark on my semester summative evaluation that was only supported by her ignoring that all semester I had been judged satisfactory in that particular area.

The resulting Plan for Improvement had been found to have been wrongly arrived at by an independent arbitrator, but in spite of this my evaluator thought it and the totally botched summative evaluation were justifications for her determining that I should be dismissed from my job by the Board, and that she would make sure she gathered enough negative information to back it up.

In spite of requests from both the Union president and myself that at the beginning of the school year after a grievance showed that my evaluator had ignored the actual evaluation process requirements and had ignored things that were actually in my classroom as a way to arrive at a negative evaluation, I be assigned a different evaluator because of our obvious adversarial relationship and the possibility of retaliation for my having filed the grievance, the principal refused the request and kept her in a position to take whatever steps she thought would support her predetermined objective of having me dismissed.

When it came to my schedule being changed the fall after my students had done so well on the End Of Instruction Tests so that I had no students who would be tested, the principal first claimed that this was due to a scheduling problem, but then later testified that it was based on her claiming that I was not collaborative with the other teachers in my department even as she further explained this opinion was not based on anything said by anyone in it. Her assessment that I did not bring a positive attitude to my fellow teachers, and, therefore, I was neither trusted by my team nor seen as a collaborator, was shown to be her personal opinion arrived at unilaterally because of the testimony of a teacher who cited many occasions when I had shared material, ideas, and approaches with more than one teacher in the department.

This unilaterally arrived at conclusion based solely on what the principal wanted to think and get others to as well, was further illustrated when she attempted to show my slide to ineffectiveness was total and extreme.

So as to drive the point of my total collapse home, the principal kept repeating under questioning that when she and I had taught at the middle school across the street from the high school she found me to have been the best teacher she had ever known. She confessed, sadly, that to see me fall as far as I had was crushing to her. However, my attorney established that even as she claimed that she could effectively rate my teaching then and could continue to asses my teaching now, she had, in fact, never been in my classroom nor had she actually seen me teach at the middle school as her gym was on the opposite side of the building and three floors down, and had never been in my room to assess my teaching at the high school before she recommended my dismissal.

At the middle school we had been friends, but at the high school the conflict between my advocating for GLBT students and her need to oppose it as it made her superiors uncomfortable and her guilt by association if she also did not appear to oppose it could kill any chance of promotion ended that friendship had ended that friendship.

What was clearly established was that her assessment of me at the middle school, as true as it might have been, was not based on any objective rubric but, rather, depended on a friendly relationship, while the assessment at the high school was based on the lack of one. In the first case we had been friends, in the second not very friendly at all.

Obviously her assessment was based on nothing concrete, but rather on her opinion of someone depending on his or her relationship with her. Her assessments were entirely arbitrary.

The union representative, who had sat through many of the antagonistic and insultingly dismissive meetings with the principal, testified that at one point the principal had made the offer that, if I transferred to another school, everything negative would be removed from my file. Either I was obviously not the bad teacher she was claiming I was, or she was willing to foist a poor teacher off on another principal, and was willing to remove any papers to hide that before the new principal did any checking.

As for the violation of sending blanket emails in violation of district policy, in evidence and testimony it was established that for the first seven years I had been at the high school and the first three years of her tenure as principal I was never spoken to about any emails I sent until the one that criticized the administrator who had prevented the two students from talking to the Board at a public meeting, and that administrator had directed the principal to deal with that. It was at that point that the principal established a policy on emails that was directed toward me and applied only to me. The rule was not a district one, but rather unique to the high school, which seemed to prove it was created to establish that I was insubordinate, especially as it was applied to emails sent before the policy was invented.

This policy not only required that any emails I sent to any faculty member individually or as a group before class, during my lunch, or after the students were dismissed for the day needed her permission to be sent, but I was also required to submit for her approval any email I intended to send to the Union members on campus in my position as their building representative. She made, or attempted to make, censoring Union communications official policy.

The chemical composition best pharmacy viagra robertrobb.com in the drug regulates the blood flow to the male reproductive organ. The sildenafil is an FDA-approved active ingredient that has been buy viagra pills clinically tested by the scientists and the ingredients of this supplement improves the act of sexual procreation. This method allows it to reach the bloodstream much get cialis without prescriptions more quickly. When sex or intimacy becomes a part of the “get behind the wheel” training. viagra generico 5mg The foolishness and overreach of this policy was illustrated when the principal testified that this prohibition also included my sending Christmas greetings to the faculty from my parents’ home in Massachusetts during the Holiday break because I had not sought her permission to do so in spite of its being clear that such an email could not possibly have been sent during school time, nor could it possibly have interfered with the educational process.

This being a uniquely applied and targeted policy was supported by any lack of evidence that any other teacher who sent blanket emails to all staff from anywhere at any time was reprimanded or even warned to cease. While my emails may have been related to the safety of GLBT students and Union information, many of the emails from other teachers and administrators that were presented in court and of which the principal was not only a recipient, but to which she had responded, dealt with bets on the Heismann Trophy winners, extra do-nuts, furniture for sale, and a time share open for rental for any teacher wanting it.

Then, in spite of all the administrators from the superintendent down to the assistant principal and all the ones in between responsible for education who testified that a teacher’s effectiveness could be judged on student test scores, they all admitted that both before and after the principal had made her recommendation to the superintendent for my dismissal, none had bothered to look at my students’ test scores.

Further, although the principal kept claiming my scores were not what they should have been in comparison to other teachers of the same grade level in spite of this, she admitted that she had made no comparisons upon which to make that claim. Had she done so, it would have been clear to her, as it was to those who kept a record of the test scores, that my students had done better than or equal to the other classes, and that the teachers with whom the principal claimed I was not collaborative had asked for advice on getting scores as good as I got.

The overall testimony of the administration came down to one thing:

The principal and her assistant had decided at the end of a faulty Plan of Improvement, which was thrown out, that they would have me dismissed, and then spent the following academic year manufacturing evidence to support that foregone conclusion.

Because of the constant involvement of the department’s out of district attorney in the most routine procedures, such as my classroom observations, her occasional presence at the most minor of meetings, and the principal’s often refusing to answer any questions in meetings until, as she had often stated, she could consult the attorney, I had always had the impression that once the principal and her assistant had decided to have me dismissed, they had contacted the attorney for guidance on how they could do this. Due to certain phrases like “asked and answered” that were often used when refusing to answer questions I or my Union representative had asked during meetings with the principal and/or my evaluator prior to the recommendation for my dismissal, and because of the very legal language used in reprimands and Plans for Improvement that neither the principal nor the assistant had been able to restate in their own words, this impression strengthened over time, and during the trial this impression had gotten stronger when, in response to questions from my attorney, both the principal and the assistant, while on the stand, would immediately look toward their attorney as if seeking guidance. This became so obvious, and happened so often that the judge had to direct them to stop doing that and answer the questions on their own.

At one point, when the assistant principal hoped to establish that I had been extremely uncooperative in my refusing to take constructive advice, the judge lost patience with the game that was being played. During my Plan for Improvement, the assistant principal had not only suggested that I sit in on another teacher’s class to observe how I should approach my classes, but went so far as to choose a Special Education class because most of my students at that time had been those who had failed their English class the first time around. I had objected to this as first, this particular teacher was always coming to me for help, advice, and resources, and, secondly, because my students were not Special Education students. She obviously equated failing students with Special Education ones. I had pointed out that a better class would have been one similar to mine.

When dealing with this, in response to a question from my attorney, the assistant principal used her words to characterize my response to her suggestion of observing that class as my having said something extremely negative and demeaning about Special Education students. When pressed to tell the court exactly what I had said as opposed how she characterized it multiple times by repeating what she claimed I had meant, the assistant principal had to be reminded by the judge that she had been asked to supply a specific alleged quote and had to answer accordingly. It was clear from her response that she had totally mischaracterized my objection, as she could not recall the actual words, or anything close to what she claimed I was to have said, but had offered her interpretation of them and had presented it to the court as if it would just have to be accepted as stated.

Her misrepresentation was very clear.

On the first day n Court, the administration had presented the carefully edited and totally controlled videos of my classroom that had been shown to the School Board at my dismissal hearing. However, on the second day, not being restrained by the district’s policy as to what could be shown, my attorney played the complete videos including those parts that had been edited out by the administrator’s attorney. It was obvious that in order to have the Board vote for my dismissal it was important that they did not see those removed parts because in them students were working at the board, reading parts in plays, reciting poetry both individually and in chorus form, doing hands on activities, and answering some very difficult questions, often discussing each other’s answers.

The reinserted parts showed that I had made constant references to information the students should have already had, and upon discovering those things it turned out they didn’t remember, I had used books and many of the physical items I had in the room to clarify information, and, for the first time, presented the students translating Caesar and some paragraphs from a Latin version of Harry Potter using their knowledge of prefixes, root words, context clues, and Spanish.

In my opinion, one of the best segments on any of the videos was the assistant principal sitting next to a bulletin board upon which was hung a huge poster titled “What You Will Learn” that contained all the Pass Objectives for the year with the video clearly showing her looking at the poster even though in her assessment of that class she had made the charge that the Pass Objectives had not been posted anywhere in the room. That charge had been advanced at the dismissal hearing.

After the trial one of the administrators from the central office who was in charge of instruction and who had testified against me based on the edited videos, informed my attorneys how angry she was at having been misled in her assessment of my teaching by the highly edited versions of the videos after having been assured that it was the complete record.

Even after it was presented in court that the assistant principal had decided before she began evaluating me that she would make sure my evaluations would lead to my dismissal, the superintendent state, as he had at his deposition, that he hoped all evaluations were objective as subjective ones would put the district in a difficult situation.

The first day of the trial lasted seven hours.