Reader: Turner, public school teachers and journalists are lying scumbags

When I see people describe me as being a bitter and hateful old man, that is usually more of a reflection on the person who made the comment than it is on me.

Quite simply, while most people who comment on this blog offer something worthwhile to say, there are those who are so filled with venom for me and most likely for themselves, that they have to lash out.

I wonder if the reason is because I do have a sizable following and the people who comment have to rely on me to provide them with a forum.

That has to drive them crazy.

I received a comment earlier this evening on the post about the resignation of Joplin R-8 Director of Communications Kelli Price, which is expected to be acted upon by the Board of Education during a closed session Thursday night.

My post mentioned that former Superintendent C. J. Huff, in a parting gift, changed Price's title and gave her a salary increase of nearly $15,000 to $63,000.

I noted that the pay increase came at the expense of 15 teachers who had received $1,000 stipends to update their schools' Facebook pages.

The comment, which can also be found at that post, began with that issue:

I didn't know that there were "stipends" for Facebook "work". No teacher should get a "Facebook stipend" for work outside the business of teaching.

Your Facebook antics in which you just had to have unsupervised contact with the kids should have got you fired. Instead, it was this blog of yours. That and you are such a nasty vicious back-biting snake.

I don't know (or much care) what this woman did to you Turner, other than serve CJ Huff. So you simply must gloat when she loses her job. It seems that all you public school teachers not only think you are entitled to a public-service job but that you have title to turn the younger generation into whining puling moral degenerate "special snowflakes" unable to be happy and satisfied, much less keep our civilization running. Thanks to you now we all know that public school teachers are as nearly as big of lying scumbags as journalists.

The reason those of us who despise you read your blog is because it takes a lone creeping-jesus scumbag to dox-out entire packs of other bottom-trough tax-feeders. Well done..

It seems like nobody who takes risks or stands out can expect to make it to retirement in the snake-pit that is public education. In the long run everyone who goes beyond simply quietly obeying the rules and teaching the kids the curriculum established by the educrat establishment gets purged.

Sounds like someone didn't have a happy experience when he was attending school and apparently, he may have a point because obviously teachers were unable to get through to him.

To straighten out a few of the misstatements in the comment:

I first wrote about the Facebook stipends in the July 17, 2013 Turner Report. I considered it to be a waste of taxpayer money and so did most of my readers. It was one of many posts in which I noted that the Huff Administration was pouring a lot of money into public relations. The district would have been better served by simply eliminating the stipends and not giving a $15,000 pay increase to Price.

-Kelli Price has never "done anything" to me. Yes, she certainly was a member of Huff's administrative team, but her role in an administration that was geared more to public relations than to substance and the fact that we were paying her $30,000 more than some classroom teachers in the district made her newsworthy. Perhaps it is not something that the Joplin Globe considered newsworthy, but my readers do.

-As for Price losing her job, I am curious as to whether the reader has information to which the rest of us are not privy. As far as I know, Price is leaving voluntarily and has lined up an opportunity in another field. I made no references to "draining the swamp," as I did with earlier resignations that were not entirely voluntary.

-As for the students, while I am no longer in the classroom and have not been for three and a half years, when I taught I did not find myself surrounded by "moral degenerate special snowflakes," whatever those may be. My students were intelligent, eager to learn, and would never have dreamed of writing anything as full of hatred and as devoid of facts as this commenter submitted. No matter what their stand on an issue, they had to back up that stance with facts, not quasi-clever remarks that reveal a lack of knowledge.

As for my Facebook "antics" with students, please. If anything untoward had happened, with the enemies I have made, it would already be public. My private Facebook messages with students were limited to about a one-week period after May 22, 2011, when I was able to help the school district locate nearly four dozen students who had not been accounted for after the tornado. Otherwise, my conversations with students, which were usually limited to questions about assignments and whether we would have school when the roads were bad, were conducted on my public Facebook page where anyone could see what I said and what they said. The only other times such conversations took place was when I was commenting, again on my public Facebook page, about subjects like the St. Louis Cardinals, the Kansas City Chiefs, or events that were in the news.The conversations could always be viewed by parents and the public.

These perversions that the reader sees behind every corner appear to be things that he thinks about quite often, since I have received many comments written with similar wording, all of which apparently came from the same person.

As for the commenter's reason why people who despise me read my blog, it is filled with as much nonsense as the remainder of the comment and his premise is wrong. The reason why so many people who despise me read my blog is much simpler than whatever it was he was trying to say.

They read my blog because they want to know what is going on.