A Joplin R-8 teacher speaks out: The district is a nightmare

If you didn't see it Thursday night, this comment was left in response to the post about the directive sent out by Joplin R-8 executive director of elementary education Jennifer Doshier that any elementary teacher who did not show up for work the day C. J. Huff waffled, changed his mind, and then closed school for high school and the middle schools, but left the elementary schools open would have to make up that day or lose a personal day. The writer is responding to a comment which supported Doshier's action.

Good for you. I'm happy you can take such a high road, judgmental that it is. As was said before, perhaps if this were just one of very few errors in judgment it wouldn't matter. But what it is one of hundreds of errors in judgment? How would you like to see the district in your community become a place where your colleagues and friends are fired unjustly or bullied until they give up and leave to make room for friends of people like this person? It hasn't happened once. It has happened over and over. How would you like to see all the work that went into "climbing Mt. Joplin" come undone because of the poor judgment of your administration? We were at the point of being unaccredited with Dr. Simpson came here. Within a few years we were accredited with distinction and stayed there for years. In fact, we stayed there until Dr. Huff came. We didn't just slide back down the mountain. We have tunneled under it. Every single day is an effort in frustration.

How would you like to work where the students receive no discipline so that there are no referrals to report? Where you don't have enough materials to use and no hope of getting any? Yet the pressure to attain an ever moving educational target is never ending. One new program after another. How about working where your paycheck has gone in the opposite direction and your stipends are diminishing? How would you like to have to worry every day about saying or doing something inconsequential that could actually get you fired if the wrong person takes it in the wrong way? Suspicion is everywhere. Trust is nowhere.

In this atmosphere little things count, like having to make up a day because the weather played against you, and that call made by an administrator who takes trips around the country continually, while on the district dollar, to make speeches about how heroic he was in saving us all from ourselves and that tornado. He makes up to an extra $8,000 a day that way. How nice for him. And the woman who wrote this email? Threw another administrator under the bus so she could have this job. Being good at your job is not what counts in order to become an administrator here. It's being willing to hurt others in order to promote yourself that counts.

Don't judge us. Why do we stay? Because it's our community and our children have been through enough without every teacher they have ever known getting up and leaving. We shouldn't have to. The Board should be able to look at the evidence around them and dismiss the man, and all his helpers, who made this mess. But since they can't seem to do that, we will protest in the only safe manner we can, and we will vote against them until they are all cleaned out of office. We won't stop until they are all gone. If it offends you, then stay where you are and read something else. We are fighting "for our kids."