I know things have been quiet here. I’m obsessed, and also getting ready for Dancergirl’s middle school graduation — a day we’re looking forward to in terms of counting days and hours. Here is her farewell note, which I thought was something worth sharing with all of you, too. It’s a great way to see what matters to our kids. I just wish the school would read it, too.

You suck.

I work my butt off for you all year, getting renaissance (above 3.25 gpa) every single trimester/quarter throughout every single year–6th through 8th– in HONORS classes with crazy teachers who make us write highschool level essays for tests, and you don’t even acknowledge me.

YOU DONT EVEN REMEMBER MY NAME–or if you do, you don’t spell it correctly

Thanks for making me really hate, fine I wont say hate–dislike with a passion– you guys. After punishing me for being a good dancer, a good student, locking me in the school one time while I was trying to do make up one of YOUR tests, and not even trusting me to get a book out of my backpack at lunch time–their exact words were, “I’m watching you.” I have some of these teachers for years and you still call me Abby, or Nicole. Jeez, is it really so hard for my PE teacher to remember my name when it’s written on my shirt???

But, you know what the worst part is? You really make me not want to work, and not want to try. Why should I? You care about the suck ups and the trouble makers. If they listen to you, why acknowledge them?

Its like when you’ve worked really hard for something, next to someone who has been working the judges over, or someone who was so bad, who didn’t care at all until they did one little thing, and its suddenly a miracle. Guess what order it goes in: The suck ups, the lazy people, the hard workers.

you know, I even tried not to care. After the stupid eighth grade awards night–of which you also messed up my brother on–I tried not to care about studying for that stupid test you try to cram in the last week of school, or the math project, or the stupid science activity. But you grrrrpeople have trained me like a dog, which is pretty much how you treat us too–and I realllly dislike you for that.

So here is my farewell wish for you, MVMS. Stop focusing on test scores like they’re the bible. Stop making it a hassle to learn, a chore, and once again make it fun, a privilege. Don’t EVER make someone regret working hard. By the time people leave your school, make ALL of them sad to be leaving–not counting the hours until they are out of a school filled with stiff necked test scores at all costs losers.

And don’t punish people for being successful.

Maybe then you’ll win back some of my respect, maybe some of the rest of my family’s too. I’m not promising though.

And to you MVMS I’m counting days, and hours until I walk through your doors for the last time–only remembering the few good times I shared with a few good friends, all enduring your school together. You boxed me in, you frowned upon my success, you worked me like a dog, and gave me a cookie to smooth it over. SEE YA!

peace

<333

Irishdancr

Irishdancr (dancergirl) blogs at Irishdancr.com

According to Liz, Wendy Portillo has been reassigned. She also has a great post up with much more constructive suggestions to voice your opinion and protest than my rant does.

You can also find a listing of posts at Whitterer on Autism in support of Alex and his family.

I’m still at a loss to understand how any right-thinking teacher could have not only allowed, but engineered this.

Update: 7:19PM From the comments, you can find a more complete list of bloggers here, and you can sign a petition here to request this teacher’s termination.

Since when did Kindergarten become Survivor: Florida? And since when did it become some sort of twisted democracy, where children were not only allowed, but encouraged, to speak their minds about their dislike of a classmate and then vote him out of class?

Well, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, it happened.

PORT ST. LUCIE — Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.

After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.

By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.

Here are some of the words his classmates used to describe him, before they made him walk the Kindergarten plank:

The other students said he was “disgusting” and “annoying,” Barton said.

“He was incredibly upset,” Barton said. “The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this.”

I have some questions about this. Let’s start with this one:

WHY IS THIS TEACHER ALLOWED TO CONTINUE TEACHING?

Let’s see if I have this straight. A teacher allows 16 5-year olds to: a) articulate their feelings and dislikes for another child; and b) vote him out of the classroom? Look at what sparked it:

Steele said the boy had been sent to the principal’s office because of disciplinary issues. When he returned, Portillo made him go to the front of the room as a form of punishment, she said.

Oh, and being ever the compassionate pseudo-psychiatrist-cum-evil-teacher-from-hell, she did allow poor Alex a confessional after booting him off the island:

Barton said after the vote, Portillo asked Alex how he felt.

“He said, ‘I feel sad,’ ” Barton said.

Alex left the classroom and spent the rest of the day in the nurse’s office, she said.

In case you’re wondering, Alex hasn’t been back to school since then. He’s been traumatized. Here are some of the consequences of Teacher Ratchet’s little exercise in community spewing:

Alex hasn’t been back to school since then, and Barton said he won’t be returning. He starts screaming when she brings him with her to drop off his sibling at school.

Thursday night, his mother heard him saying “I’m not special” over and over.

Ya know what, Bitch-teacher-from-hell-Portillo-Ratchet-Asperger’s-hating-child-abuser? Let’s bring you up before a group of your peers so they can tell you how much you suck for treating this boy — a child who clearly has behavior and esteem problems — like a sack of shit in front of his peers at an age where he’s unlikely to forget it anytime soon.

Listen up, Portillo. My most vivid memories are of kindergarten, and being smacked across the knuckles with a ruler in front of the whole kindergarten class for daring to speak when not spoken to. My most vivid memories include being beaten up on the playground in KINDERGARTEN, for god’s sake.

My most vivid parenting memories involve being called into school to justify my son’s fight for the right to breathe when a bully put him in a chokehold in first grade, and the only way he could escape was to bite the bully, leaving him branded for the next five years as a hyperactive, at-risk troublemaker while the bully, nearly twice his size, swaggered away scot-free.

Portillo, you’re nothing more than a poorly trained excuse for an authoritarian bitch who shouldn’t be anywhere near children, much less teaching them. If the school district doesn’t see this as child abuse, they’re as ignorant as you are, because it clearly is.

Just so this isn’t anything more than a rant, let me offer some suggestions to you, Portillo. Take some classes in child development, autism and Asperger’s syndrome. Learn some creative ways to build these children up rather than tearing them down. Learn to UNDERSTAND that what you do now will MATTER to them 10 years from now, that you are forming their attitudes toward school, peers, social relationships, and authority.

What you did to this child was to say that the opinions of his peers matter more than the authority of the teacher. You taught him and all of the other children that it was okay to criticize, rather than understand, how it is to deal with a disability. You stood in front of that class and allowed 16 children to consider another child a worthless waste of effort.

Worse still, you abrogated your authority to sixteen 5-year olds.

You ought to be fired, brought up on charges of abuse, and sued for every damn dime you have.

And to the principal of that school? Screw you. Screw you for not standing up for this child when you discovered what the teacher had done. Screw you for allowing any child in your school to be treated with such a lack of respect. Screw you for not understanding how devastating this was.

And finally, to his parents, I am hoping there is a way through this that undoes this damage. Perhaps a public apology to him in front of the classroom and all of the other kindergartners and all of the other teachers would be a start. I hope you can find a way clear to help him understand that he can take something like this and overcome it.

I’m not sure, though. Because that vote — that vote is so horrible to even imagine, that I can’t imagine getting over it anytime soon, Asperger’s or otherwise.

Portillo, you’re evil.

Photo courtesy of the Barton family

Melanie Bowers and her family need some re-education on immigration and prejudice, I think.

Earlier this week, Melanie Bowers brought a poster to school protesting illegal immigration, then claimed that it was taken away from her by a gang of students who beat and threatened her. The poster was assigned as homework and her protest read “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.”

When school administrators went back and reviewed surveillance tapes, they found a different story. It seems that while the poster was taken from her, no one touched her.

After Melanie’s accusations, administrators reviewed school survellience videotape of the incident - which, instead of showing students beating or attacking her, showed Bowers scratching herself on her arms, face, and neck, and walking through the halls of the school calmly long after she claimed the incident happened.

It doesn’t surprise me all that much to hear that a 13-year old girl with some pretty heavy-handed opinions on illegal immigration might make much more of a small incident than it was, but I give kudos to parents’ response.

Bowers’ parents have apologized to school administrators for their daughter, and Bowers’ father, Gary Bower Jr., is agreeing with the charges against her. “I have reviewed the recording and agree with the charges that will need to be filed,” he has said today.

Melanie’s mother, Shera Bowers, released a statement which reads, “I see my daughter was not assaulted, and put the marks on her body. No gang violence as witnessed. She filed a false report.”

No excuse-making. No blaming of the school authorities. No backhanded efforts to blame anyone but the one who should shoulder the blame. Credit where credit is due to them, and good for the school for following through and getting to the truth.

Seriously, this could have been a colossal mess. Blaming, angry parents on both sides, showdowns at the school board, op-eds written about how dangerous our middle schools are, and so on. If I were one of the parents of the students accused, I’d be furious, and honestly the only thing that might have been left out of the Bowers’ statements was an apology to the kids unfairly accused. That, and an acknowledgment that their own racism has been transferred to their daughter quite efficiently.

Melanie’s lie played up to the deepest fears in all parents — the idea that by sending their child to a school with a diverse population of students, she was at risk for beatings and gang threats (that’s implicit in Ms. Bowers’ statement) and all manner of other unspeakable and unimaginable dangers. Of course, the local news media played right into it with their sensational headline and sound bites from the father, who made the following statement after the initial report, but before the facts were known:

“They handled this wrong, you know, they put a child back in danger,” said J.R. Bowers. “It was a very racially motivated crime.”

He went on to say this:

“I won’t be happy until the kids that did this are out of school,” Bowers said.

If any good comes of this, let it be that the Bowers look at their own knee-jerk response against the truth and understand that they reaped what they sowed. What their daughter believes about immigrants, legal or otherwise, and about people who are different from her reflects what they believe.

If their apology is to have any meaning at all to the falsely accused students, it should come with a resolve on their part to change those racist views and begin to understand that speaking a different language and looking different doesn’t equal evil or violence. If that were to happen, real good could come from an otherwise pathetic incident.

Technorati Tags: Melanie Bowers, racism, school attack, illegal immigration

Here’s a crime alert for all 8th graders: If you buy Skittles in Connecticut schools, you might lose everything. It’s a scandal, I tell you — a SCANDAL.

From Consumer Freedom:

What does it take for a school to suspend an eighth-grader, bar his attendance from an honors dinner, and strip him of his post as class Vice President? If you guessed drugs, alcohol, or a firearm, think again. A bag of candy is reason enough. This week, a Connecticut school levied these very punishments on an honor student with no history of misconduct, just for buying a bag of Skittles from his classmate. School officials are hiding behind their “Wellness Policy”—which prohibits bake sales, classroom pizza parties, and the sale of candy—as justification for the harsh disciplinary action.

As the parent of a Skittle-eating 8th grade honor student who does not hold class office, I object to the Wellness police suspending this student and stripping him of his honors for daring to buy a bag of candy from a friend. Let’s see if we can figure out the message this young man received…

All of your hard work to meet our learning objectives and to demonstrate current and future leadership qualities means nothing, because you did not respect YOUR body enough to keep that nasty sugar out of it.

What crack are those Connecticut school officials smoking? Speaking of smoking, I predicted this would happen when they finished with the tobacco companies and moved on to ‘wellness report cards’. My amazingly fit daughter who dances eight hours or more per week has a broken finger to show for the California fitness initiatives. Thanks a whole heap, California. Still, California doesn’t measure up to Connecticut or some other states, who are convinced that the pathway to wellness can only be forged by suspending achieving students for daring to eat a Skittle.

Thank God it wasn’t a Hershey bar. I’ll bet he’d have been expelled. An apology is in order from school officials, who have mistakenly confused this boy’s Skittles with their crack pipes.

(via BoingBoing)

Technorati Tags: Skittles, middle school, wellness, stupid schools, Connecticut

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It’s the season for high school enrollment and planning for DG, and it’s an interesting dilemma. Unlike Sticks, she has no ‘mainstream passion’ that she can channel into her high school years, which means we can plan her academics easily enough but not the electives.

In a sincere effort to help, she was descended upon by five “career women”, who explained that she really only needs to focus on one goal — getting to college and studying for a career in accounting, dentistry, teaching or medicine.

She was appalled. She told me she felt pressured, boxed in, angry a little bit that they would limit her future so severely. She said she might want to travel, to see the world, to feed the poor in Afghanistan, help build Iraq, and why were they so narrowly putting her into such a tight pathway?

I agree. Are we so focused on our girls being traditional successes that we would push them into the traditional “men’s careers”? And why just those four? What about rocket science, web design, social media, art?

Here’s what one of them said to a bright and talented girl drummer: “The band won’t get you anywhere; math will.”

Such narrow thinking! Imagine a world 20 years from now where we pushed our daughters into dull, boring, uncreative jobs, where we told them they needed to train for employment instead of entrepreneurship? Why aren’t we encouraging them to think past the traditional, into the ‘cloud’? Why not technology, why not the web?

This reminds me of the narrow thinking of my mother, the cautious “don’t give up your day job for the arts” ever-practical and incredibly stifling advice. Surely we can do better for our daughters.

I told her I want her to tune that stuff out and listen to me. At age 14, she shouldn’t have a clue as to what she wants to do, but should be encouraged to learn at her very highest potential, to explore, to dig deeper than the surface, and to dream of what she thinks she can do rather than what they tell her she should do.

The rest will follow.

Technorati Tags: futures, college, career, dreams

If you’re a teacher or a cop, you’d better. From Wired News:

Gulf Middle School resource officer John Nohejl didn’t have porn on his MySpace profile, and he didn’t link to porn. But one of the 170-odd people on his friends list, which seems mostly populated by students at his school, had a link to a legal adult site. Now the New Port Richey Police Department and the Florida attorney general’s elite cyber crimes unit are investigating him for making adult content available to underage children.

My first thought when I read this paragraph was that there was another Julie Amero case in the making. Here are the facts:

1. Officer Nohejl set up a MySpace account and had nearly 200 people on his friends list, mostly students at his school. I’m assuming that his purpose in doing so was to make himself accessible to these students and offer a resource for cyberbullying and the like.
2. Unbeknownst to Officer Nohejl, one of the people on his friends list had a link to an adult site. I’m guessing it might have been Adult Friend Finder, since they are the most egregious spam offenders, but it could have been a kid who registered as an adult and had added ‘friends’ who were really just porn links. Whatever the case, it was NOT on the officer’s friends list, wasn’t even on his radar.

   From the St. Petersburg Times:

   The offensive links were discovered after an anonymous caller phoned the Times to complain, saying her son and his friends accessed the “Amateur Match Free Sex” site via the officer’s page on Monday.

3. Officer Nohejl is now under investigation by the Florida attorney general’s cyber crimes unit and the New Port Richey Police Department.

Now personally, I’m more concerned about the New Port Richey Police Department, because I’m guessing they referred it up to the AG’s office instead of looking carefully at the circumstances which might have given rise to the discovery of porn links on the officer’s friends’ page. If they have an investigation like Julie Amero’s, Officer Nohejl might find himself facing trumped-up charges of child endangerment or some other absurdity.

A couple of red flags went off immediately for me. The first was the “anonymous caller” to the Times. If you are a parent and you discovered a trail of links on MySpace that linked from the officer’s page to a friend’s page to a porn site, would you call the newspaper without first notifying the officer? Keep in mind, these were NOT direct links. It stinks to high heaven to me - smells like either a setup by a student or another hysterical parent, a la Nate Fisher, who, when confronted with their middle schooler’s exposure to the nasty content, looked for the first person they could to blame.

Here’s another red flag, courtesy of the Florida Attorney General’s office:

Cybersafety “is the attorney general’s highest priority,” said Sandy Copes, the attorney general’s spokeswoman. “I am sure the attorney general would be extremely concerned if a member of the trusted law enforcement community was either inadvertently or directly placing students at risk to being exposed to inappropriate content.”

What the bold text says to me is this: You’d better check every single link from your MySpace or Facebook pages and from your Friends’ MySpace page and you’d better do it on a daily basis. Maybe even hourly. Consider this: Someone has a grudge and intentionally adds a link to an adult site to their MySpace page, calls the paper, gets law enforcement involved, etc. But just an hour before, that person’s page was free of offending links. How often should someone like Officer Nohejl check outbound links on friends’ pages? Most importantly, how is he responsible for what someone else places on their page?

The school principal and police department had full and complete knowledge of the officer’s MySpace profile. They knew he was using it from his home because of district filters, and they knew why he had it. To expect him to monitor links from his friends’ pages to other pages is utterly absurd.

Here’s the final irony: When Wired News was checking out this story they discovered links from the official school web site to a gay porn site. How did that get there, you ask? The original, legitimate web site’s domain had expired, a domain scraper bought the name and placed adult content links on the site. Happens every day. But do take note: No one sent this one up to the AG’s office for investigation, downplaying it as a “troublesome, but not so sinister” occurrence.

I urge the police department and attorney general’s office in Florida to issue an explanation and drop all criminal investigation of this school resource officer who has had nothing but glowing reports and reviews.

For the rest of us — do you know what’s three links away from your site? Maybe you should.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, social networks, florida, cybercrime, legal, law

Julie asked for us to tell about our experience with the arts in school and where they fit in education. It’s no secret that I believe the arts should be considered as essential to students’ educational experience as reading, science and math. Here are some of the benefits our family has derived from having arts opportunities during our time with the public schools:

• College Scholarship for full tuition + extra for expenses
• First semester college grade report came today. 18 Units taken, 18 completed, GPA 3.667, 8 As, 2 Bs. Total units completed via AP and class attendance: 28
• Part-time work for a local music company as a transcriber, making twice the hourly pay of other part-time jobs.
• A performance like this:

Click To Play

I don’t intend to sound braggy, because I attribute none of his success to anything I did or didn’t do. I do, however, give major credit to the opportunities he was given all the way through his public school journey with regard to music and the arts.

Long-term readers of this blog know that the subject of those bullet items is my ADHD-officially-classified-at-risk-middle-son (aka Sticks), who is a kickass drummer (at least in my motherly opinion) now attending college on a full Jazz Studies scholarship. Short, skinny and hyper, he made his mark through high school with a pair of drumsticks and graduated with honors and local recognition because he had the opportunity to learn, play, perform, and compete in the school music programs.

Studies prove that music enhances student’s learning abilities, just as physical exercise helps them to focus on their studies. But with all of the emphasis on NCLB, arts programs are dwindling, underfunded and the red-headed stepchildren of many, many school systems. By minimizing the arts we are sending a message to those kids gifted with abilities in music, drama and the fine arts that their gifts are second-class, despite the fact that kids allowed to stretch their artistic talents apply those same skills to their academic performance.

Those same musical opportunities kept me focused, connected, and successful in high school. When I went to college and left music and performance behind, I became disconnected and ultimately dropped out. I’m grateful every day that Sticks is motivated and energetic about pursuing his musical goals…I have full faith that he will succeed at it because he has experienced those early successes.

Technorati Tags: education, arts in education, performing arts, video, school, balance