How bad could a middle school two blocks from our house be? It's a nice neighborhood. I know some of the parents who send their kids there. Things that don't jibe: the school is on a tree-lined street in a desirable neighborhood, in one of the best towns the #$%#$% County Public School system occupies. People lie and break laws to get their kids to go there. I agreed to send my daughters, who are nice, good kids, there. The parents I know who send their kids there are nice parents and some of their kids are nice, good kids.
I have seen two students and one teacher be led out of the school in handcuffs this year. My daughters have told me stories about school fights that would have made somebody money if they were caught on camera -- earring-ripping, bottles-smashing, dirt-lying, rib-kicking brawls. And these are just the girls.
My daughters so regularly tell me about being hollered at for misunderstandings that did not even involve them, that they think it is normal to be spoken to that way.
Act 1: 
My sixth grader, who is one of the kindest soul who walks the
planet, is soft-spoken, good to the core, and desires peace, calm and
order in her daily life. She happens to have a bladder the size of a six
ounce juice container. That means that when she drinks six ounces of
juice, and she says she need to go to the bathroom a short time later,
she really needs to go. She's not lying. She needs to
release her bladder. Not on the floor in the hallway, or on somebody's
science fair project, as is assumed by school personnel. She is not trying to slip off campus, leave class
to sell drugs, nor does she have intentions of defacing school
property. She just wants to urinate in the toilet and go back to class.
She has been denied the opportunity to use the bathroom in school, often all day. She has been forced to have a male security guard escort her to the toilet, and wait outside of the bathroom and escort her back to class. Yes we called the principal (remember "Wilson?"), and after a few weeks, had a meeting. We were told that the children are allowed to use the bathroom if needed.
My daughter had no luck. Being a problem solver, she tried another tactic. She raced to a class in one minute, and asked the teacher if she could quickly go to the bathroom. The teacher said that she could, but she would be marked tardy if she came back late. My daughter weighed her options: pee on the floor in front of her peers, or use the toilet and risk being marked tardy. The child race walked to the bathroom, used it, and race walked back to find that the door was locked and she was on the wrong side of it. She motioned to the teacher through the tall rectangle of glass in the door, a sort of shrugging" what's up?" motion, and the teacher pointed to the office and screamed "Detention! You've got detention for being late. Get to the office!"
Nobody expects the #%#$% County School System!
Our chief weapon is surprise....surprise and fear....fear and surprise!
Act 2: 
My eighth grader is classified as "highly gifted." That term,
although not worth a lot to me, is like a golden ticket in the @#$%@#$%
County Public School System. She gets to take special classes, which as
far as I can tell, aren't really special, because they are just as
continually interrupted by "read-ins" * and state testing preparation
as the other classes, but they are staffed by a few cream-of-the-crop
teachers, which almost makes it all worth it.
This child became interested in the Law Studies class, and once in, became enamored of Mock Trial competition. The teacher who taught the class and ran the club, was also the school soccer coach. He was a frenetic, scattered, possibly narcissistic man, and judging from things he said about himself, likely not successful in former careers. My daughter had played soccer for him the previous year, and her radar had remained up from dealing with him as a coach.
The girl and I had a talk. Not only did she agree to not be alone with him, she had decided on her own that that would be a good idea. She also decided on her own to take whatever he said with a grain of salt, as he was proving himself to be of poor character to her. The things he said didn't match the things he did. He often promised the girls candy bars, parties, dinners out and never came through, thank goodness. Before the start of an exam, the teacher placed a photo of himself on my daughter's desk and said, "For inspiration." He gave gifts of hats and t-shirts to other girls.
In December of 2007, my daughter's good friend and three other chums were grading papers for this teacher. One of them flipped over a page and found a photograph of the teacher's wife that was so anatomically revealing the kids could have probably see her cervix if they had known where to look. There followed much more proof of the differences between boys and girls, the teacher's fidelity to his wife, his wife's fitness level and her real hair color. The children, who had been grading papers for a Law class, were given a brief seminar in anatomy and physiology, or possibly art photography criticism, whereby they were able to discern things they didn't need to know people had -- scrotal hair, leather fetishes, positional preferences, and more.
My daughter, thankfully, did not see these photographs. In my perfect world, once the children had taken the photographs to a trusted teacher, which they did, the teacher would have reported them, which she did, and the man would have been removed from the company of all children immediately, by having his position suspended. This did not happen. It took over a month for the man to be removed from school, despite the fact that the entire school heard about the photographs by lunch time, and recreations of the photos, in pen and ink, by the more artistically talented students, were circulating before the end of the school day.
Was the teacher a sicko who planted the photos on purpose, or was he just a roob who made a career-ending mistake? We, the parents of @#$%@#$% School in Q@$%$ County, will never know, because the administration never called, us, wrote a letter, or answered any of a number of our phone calls.
What they did do was to interrupt their forced viewing of An Inconvenient Truth, and call them into a room with an order to write down all the strange things this teacher had ever done. They were told this was anonymous, and to speak freely. Then when they handed their papers in, they were told to sign the m My daughter, who questioned this, but who did not have the confidence to refuse to sign the paper, was told that the teacher would never see the papers and everything she wrote would be safe.
The next day at school, the teacher was there in a nasty mood. He made snide comments about having to watch what he said around the children. MY daughter was later told by another teacher that the man had read their "confessions."
In a "postal" climate, where anyone can snap and shoot up a place, and this possibly unstable teacher had access to his students' addresses, taking this kind of action, or taking any action at all aside from immediately removing the man from school, was unwise.
About a month after making phone calls to the school and being told to "take it up with the county", our girls were interviewed one on one with a psychologist, without permission from the parents. My daughter called out of class and asked, among other questions, if she had done any role-playing with the teacher in the closet.
My daughter, at age 14 now knows about sexual role-playing, as I got to explain it to her that night when she came home with questions. She really, really didn't need to know this at her age. The child has a naturally twisted sense of humor, and "role playing in the closet" often comes up as a suggestion to a punishment, or an event that happened at school. This is not a preferred state of enlightenment, but it is a good thing my kid can roll with it.
NOBODY expects the #$%@$%^ County Public School System!
Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....
Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency....
Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to ourselves!
She'll be rolling with it at private school next year.
* a read in- is a school-wide exercise that forces children to read the captions on low-quality Disney sit-coms, instead of allowing them to read actual literature chosen by the children. My daughter has been yelled at and forced to put down Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetze in order to read the captions for an episode of That's So Raven.
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