Reader: Give C. J. Huff credit for getting rid of trashy teachers like Turner

A few moments ago, I received a comment from a reader who was quite upset with my earlier post saying that the departure of more than half of the Joplin R-8 School District's faculty over the past four years has created serious problems.

For some reason, I have a feeling that this reader is not from this school district, though I could be wrong, but is simply one of those people who likes to take advantage of every opportunity they get to cut me down to size, using everything except facts.

This reader is trying to lump together every teacher who has left the school district with me. He also repeats the same statement he has used every time- that I was fired for cause.

He never mentions that I have made the complete, unedited transcript of my hearing available. For a considerable time, it was available free of charge to anyone who wanted it. I would still be happy to send anyone a copy.

It should be noted that Huff and the entire board of education that was involved in my firing are no longer connected with the school. I am not claiming that has anything to do with my case, but it shows that I am far from the only one who thinks, with considerable evidence, that the Huff years were a nightmare.

It should also be noted that I did not say anywhere that C. J. Huff was responsible for the school shooting threat or the alleged rape on Joplin High School grounds. I blame him for the lion's share of the disciplinary problems that exist in the school system and the behavioral problems that have been mentioned several times by Interim Superintendent Norm Ridder. When you fail to back your teachers and intimidate younger, more inexperienced teachers into thinking they are in trouble if they write any disciplinary referrals, and when you drive away a disproportionate number of the experienced teachers who were able to help to maintain whatever discipline was left, you should quite rightly expect to take the blame for the general atmosphere, if not for specific incidents.

The text of the reader's comment is printed below:

This entire blog has but one premise: It is ALWAYS the fault of CJ Huff and anyone and everyone who had something to do with the inevitable firing of Turner. This entire blog is nothing but Randy Turner trying to re-write history in favor of simply letting the teachers teach whatever they please without accountability or restraint.

Forcing young people into confinement in which they have no ability or willingness to learn whatever foolishness is fashionable at the time there might well be incidents in which like prisoners they get all violent or at the very least unruly. The solution is to segregate classes upon the ability and willingness to learn the necessary curriculum offered, teach them up to the limits of their abilities, and let the rest go do something which they find profitable to themselves and their future.

Turner's solution to everything: Listen to Turner and punish CJ Huff and the former school board who detected Turner and gave Turner a hearing and fired Turner for cause. Otherwise Joplin will become another Columbine or Sandy Hook.

This is not only self-serving but patently ridiculous.

The last thing anyone should do is to listen to Turner other than to figure out what not to do. The basis for public education is that taxpayers and parents elect school board members who set policies as opposed to public educrats doing so. Any teacher who wants to personally set school policy and curriculum will end up like Randy Turner and usually sooner rather than later. These mental and moral mediocrities get into something that they think is easy going for those of their limitations and for a few years they energetically do what they are told. Then they get some "experience" and think about how easy it would be if only the school board comprised of non-educrats would listen to their "wis-dumb". Then they try to implement on a limited fashion on their own limited classroom their pet theories, and either get slapped down and buckle under back to democratically-elected policy or they get rebellious and are caught again, fired, or made to resign.

The CJ Huff Administration, for all its faults, was excellent in detecting such teachers like Turner and sending them packing. The glaring fault of the CJ Huff Administration and the Joplin R-8 School Board of the time was in going through the tax money while blaming the tornado. CJ Huff and the board of that time was sent packing by the taxpayers for such financial wastage, and NOT for firing incompetent teachers like Turner.

Turner got caught out several times, given the choice to "move on", decided to publicly fight the matter as opposed to sneaking into another district and then either behaving or getting detected again, given an open and fair hearing in which all sides were heard, and then publicly terminated.

Now in Turner's forced early retirement -- nobody will ever hire Turner as a teacher ever again -- Turner re-writes his memoirs in the form of this dishonest whining blog.

Now lest anyone of Turner's groupies and peers yawp about how "Nobody needs to read this blog", which is irrelevant as well as correct, let's say that many of us just love to read how Turner is suffering, how neither Turner nor Turner's fellow flunkies have any intention of learning from the consequences of their stupidity, and how upon every occasion Turner and those like Turner will seek to blame "society", i.e. the very foundation of public education (elected local officials to disburse and set policy for local tax moneies and local public property), which gives them employment in the first place.

They think that they all are Socrates -- who came to a bad end when the restored democracy has enough of Socrates "teaching" the very traitors and tyrants who destroyed Athens' Golden Age. Rather, these "teachers" are more like Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote: Unable to learn from their mistakes but wanting everyone else to suffer from their failed amoral stupidity.