There aren’t many media outlets any more that report trouble with the public education system—where employees lose control of themselves and abuse their authority over young students. One reason is that those media outlets have been watching an erosion of trust that voters have toward public education, and it’s scary to them. To many people their school aged years were the best days of their lives, and they want good memories for their children. They want to overlook trouble when it presents itself so that their children can have the nice experience they had when they were young students. Yet, to my experience, I hated my public education years. It was extremely confining and I always considered it a waste of time. The older I get, the more firmly I feel that the entire system should be completely overhauled so to more properly utilize the natural ambition exhibited by children toward learning—because public education has a tendency to kill that ambition leaving flat, boring adults as a product of that institutional system of learning. Channel 5’s Karin Johnson and I have had this talk before and over time, we have moved in different directions. My experience with advocating for lower tax imposition upon communities is easy for me, because I think the system always needed to be changed. But for her, she had a very good public education experience and it is hard to look back and be critical of it. But to her credit, unlike most reporters in and around Cincinnati—she still does a lot of education news and when something goes wrong, she’s there to sniff it out.
According to a report filed Monday and reported nearly exclusively by Channel 5’s Karin Johnson and the Journal News reporter Lauren Pack, a student at Edgewood Middle School told the school resource officer that a female substitute teacher struck her in the face with a ruler. Two other students claimed the substitute teacher taped their hands to a chair. The incidents occurred between Feb. 16 and Feb. 27, according to the report.
Wisely school Principal Alesia Beckett removed the substitute teacher from the school and took measures to have her removed from the county’s substitute teaching list, which is facilitated through Warren County Educational Service Center.
“I was made aware of the situation on Thursday afternoon. The sub was not in the building on Thursday, so I met with her prior to the start of class on Friday morning. After our meeting, I let her know that her time here was over and that she needed to get her things and leave. At that point, our school resource officer and I confirmed that she had exited the building,” Beckett said. She added the woman was a long-term sub for a teacher on leave.
http://oldschoolcincy.com/29316/butler-county-teacher-accused-of-duct-taping-and-hitting-students/
I admire Karin for doing these stories, because there is a lot of pressure not to do them—because people generally want to feel good about public education. But……they want and need to know about teachers substitute or otherwise who let the power go to their heads to the point where they are abusive. My accusation is that most parents use public education as a baby sitting service and could care less what really happens to kids in public school because they are too busy to think about it. Acknowledging that there are serious flaws in public education takes guts, and to her credit, Karin has it. She doesn’t see the demonizing that I do, because our perspective was different, but the results are something that the truth will ultimately carry everyone to eventually. I would have loved to have graduated from high school in the third grade. Some people never want to graduate, and wish to always remain 15 years old. So differences will always be present. But what matters most is overcoming those types of handicaps to tell the truth about a situation so that the voting population can take measure.
If Karin Johnson didn’t do stories like this, there would be no reason for administrators to take swift action to stop bad behavior. In this case Principal Beckett acted correctly and the Journal News and Channel 5 was there to apply the needed pressure from the media to keep everyone honest. But many of the local community papers are so dependent on local school advertising that they have lost their objectivity in reporting the bad news surrendering their integrity to only report the good touchy feely stories that keep levy money pouring in.
Without some level of competition the power-hungry and abusive types find it irresistible to dominate individuals thrown under their command by the power of a position. There are certainly a percentage of police officers who are drawn to the field of police work because it gives them power over other people. There are others who enjoy being in control at the front of a class room and having power over others. It is a powerful experience for someone who craves power to stand in front of a class of 30 people and hold their fates over the fires of judgment. Being the type of person who hates authority with nearly every cell in my body, I had my fill of this behavior in kindergarten. It was a real struggle to not get into trouble because I never allowed myself to yield to any authority figures. Teachers were the first I was exposed to and I never yielded and am extremely proud of it. That trait does me very well currently. I used to make the lives of people like this Edgewood substitute teacher a living hell, and I enjoyed it—because I knew they enjoyed having power over little kids. I still enjoy seeing people like that fall from grace, because I think of them as bad people to begin with. But, it’s not easy to accept by those who want the system to work.
But be assured, this is not an isolated case. It’s just an under reported one. Government schools are filled with these personality types and there just aren’t enough Karin Johnston’s out there, or newspaper reporters like Lauren Pack who ask the dive down questions that are hard for public relations professionals to step around. If not for those two, there might be no public education stories of any honest assessment left in traditional Southwestern Ohio media. Everyone else has pretty much given up and fallen in with the feel good sentiment that keeps levy money pouring in from voters and feeding the corruption and destruction of minds built so negatively in public education. Thankfully, everyone hasn’t given up. Karin may want to preserve the current system with honest reporting, but at least she’s not a sell-out. And that makes her a very good person.
Rich Hoffman
CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.
The Overmanwarrior 