I mentioned that forgotten (for one day, at least) anniversary on Facebook and provided a link to my May 23, 2013, post, "The books that got me fired," which included my recording of Smith's "interrogation."
I did not think much of it at the time, but apparently there were either 10,000 plus people who had never heard of this before, there were that many people who wanted to relive the events of that day, or more likely a combination of the two.
It was easily the most visited Turner Report post of the week.
It was not, however, the most visited post from all of my blogs. It did not even receive half as many visits as the top post on the Inside Carthage blog, a request for people to be on the lookout of a child molestation suspect.
The Turner Report top posts once again revolved around unfortunate circumstances for the school district, with three of the posts concerning North Middle School reading teacher and the various criminal charges she faces.
The number two post for the week was the first p erson account of the former Joplin High School student telling the story of the rape that has led her to file a lawsuit against the school district.
The Turner Report
1. The books that got me fired
2. Document: Joplin High School rape victim tells her story
3. Kansas City Star posts video of Ron Richard's "kiss my ass" quote
4. Ron Mitchell hired as East Newton superintendent
5. Turner Report exclusive: Photos of other Pittsburg High School principal finalists
6. Newton County files kidnapping, rape, sodomy charges against North Middle School teacher
7. North Middle School teacher pleads not guilty to statutory rape charge
8. Arraignment scheduled for North Middle School teacher on statutory rape charge
9. So you want to be a Joplin High School head baseball coach
10. A tribute to a middle school principal
Inside Joplin
1. Joplin Police: Do you know this man?
2. Jasper County sheriff warns of telephone computer virus scam
3. Joplin Police Department Weekend Arrests
4. Jasper County Dissolution of Marriage Petitions
5. Jasper County Sheriff's Office Arrests
6. Joplin Police Department Arrests April 11-12
7. Joplin Police Department Arrests April 13-14
8, Newton County Dissolution of Marriage Petitions
9. Joplin Police Department Arrests April 10-11
10. Joplin Police Department Arrests April 12-13
Inside Joplin Obituaries
1, Dr. Phil Harrison
2. Candace Menapace
3. Billie Lentz
4. Curtis Williams
5. Ken Booe
6. Gerald Smith
7. Gloria Skelton
8. Tim Carver
9. Alen Minard
10. Teresa Abramovitz
Inside Carthage
1. Carthage Police: Be on the lookout for this child molestation suspect
Inside Springfield
1. Springfield business owner pleads guilty to fraud, embezzling, failure to pay taxes
19 comments:
Its always about you Randy. We don't care. Most of us are glad you got removed from being around our children.
Your logic leaves a lot to be desired. Why would 10,000 people go to a link they don't even care about. My guess is you also have nothing whatsoever to do with Joplin children either. More than four years have passed since I taught my last class and there has yet to be anyone who criticized me for my teaching. I am sorry that it irritates you that more people than ever read the Turner Report. That says a lot more about you than it does about me.
I fail to see why those people who are irritated by you continue to read your blog when the entire internet is available to them to search out those things that make them happy. Keep doing what you do, Randy. You are both a wonderful teacher and talented writer.
Do you still have your teaching certificate?
Yes.
Then go teach..
This is where Turner typed out his defense of how big bad CJ has ruined his career. What he really tries to do his deflect away from his own personal misgivings and mistakes. Let's face it, if any person currently employed by the Joplin school district were to write a sexually-explicit book, and that book were to be discovered bye a patron in the community, they would be crucified on this website. Turner likes to refer to himself as an "author".....so we will use the term loosely and go with that for the sake of argument. Any teacher with half a brain would not have done what Turner did. Yes I know he will say that he never provided the material to the kids which is true I suppose form reading the transcripts of the trial. But, if you really thought that being around Junior High kids but also publishing a book that had graphic content was okay, then no matter what I might think of Huff, he was justified in removing people like you from the educational system. There's no way for people to disprove whether or not you were a good teacher in the classroom as the people reading this blog did not sit in the classroom with you. The things I have heard from others is that you weren't necessarily good nor bad but just a mediocre teacher.
I don't know why Turner lets people like the ones who have commented continue to attack his character. Here we go again with the line that the Joplin Globe and their bloggers Anson Burlingame and Geoff Caldwell pushed about Turner's book being pornography. There is no doubt that came from Huff. The book has sex scenes, but it is nowhere near pornography. The decision by the board made it clear Turner had not done anything immoral of indecent. The lawyers had to make absolutely certain to put that in the opinion after the way Huff, Tina Smith and others cast one aspersion after another about Turner's character. He was fired for three reasons. 1. He advertised his book on a personal website that had not been used for school purposes, but had been three years earlier. The site still said it was for East Middle School students because Turner never got around to removing that statement. He also admitted his mistake during his interview with Tina Smith. 2. He supposedly shared "confidential student information" by printing student stories about the tornado in a book and publishing it without admin's knowledge. Turner and two other witnesses testified that the principal knew about the book. The principal said he did not. The testimony also made it clear that Turner did not make any money off the book and had received permission to use the student work. That is a far cry from sharing "confidential student information.' 3. Turner recorded Tina Smith's questioning to protect himself from being railroaded. Huff and his lawyer twisted board policy that prevented recordings involving students and said Turner violated board policy. Several months later, the board added a policy prohibiting such recordings. In other words, he was fired for violating a policy that didn't become a policy until months later. And that is it- the whole case. We people do support Randy Turner and think it is a crime that he has been out of the classroom for the last few years wonder why the Board of Education will not do what is right. There have been many cases against teachers and other people in the public eye who are accused of doing something wrong and people leap to their defense, only to have it turn out they had done the horrible things they were accused of doing. With Turner, people leaped to his defense immediately and have never had any reason to regret it. Nothing else about him has surfaced and it has been four years. In those four years, he has done as much as anyone to straighten up the mess that Cj Huff made of the Joplin School District. He has started a valuable news service that has benefited the community, and published a book that revealed the problems the city and the district had following the tornado. It probably is too late for the board to take action to put Turner back in the classroom, but a statement that what happened to Turner was wrong is the least they can do.
I don't intend to try to top the length of either of the previous comments, but I thank both of you for writing. As for the one before those two, I was expecting your comment since the first question was obviously the setup for a bad joke.
I can teach in Missouri. I still have my teaching certificate.
I have applied for more than three dozen teaching openings since June 2013. I have never been called for an interview. I also have applied for reinstatement at Joplin R-8 and told to apply for teaching openings and I would be treated the same as any other candidate. I have applied. I have never been called for an interview, nor did I expect to get one.
While I would love to return to the classroom, it has become obvious that is not likely to happen. I don't need the school board or anyone else to clear my name. Though I was initially concerned after my hearing if people were going to believe C. J Huff's version of reality, I quickly found out most people didn't believe him about much of anything. Only a die hard few think I did anything wrong beyond what I admitted to right from the start- I should have removed the wording on the Room 210 Discussion website about EMS that the previous commenter noticed.
I enjoy what I am doing and have some new projects coming in the near future. Hopefully, they will irritate some of my negative commenters as much as everything else I do.
(And yet, they keep coming back for more.)
Yet again....anf dissenting voices or people who support you are "negative". Perhaps you should look a bit deeper into that face looking back at you when you look into the mirror. Perhaps the negativity is being projected. Just a thought....
Turner is a mediocre journalist and even worse school teacher that thinks he is far more clever than he is and then gets caught, forced out, and blacklisted.
The owners of the newspaper didn't have to prove anything and so they fired him. Then he went into school teaching and kept his head down for a few years. But Turner couldn't refrain from misbehavior, got caught, and after "due process" was fired. Like in the newspaper business the easiest and best way to deal with Turner is not to deal with Turner at all.
Turner is a sociopath in that it took Turner over fifty years to figure out that nobody street-wise is fooled by Turner's behavior. Anyone who publicly finds Turner credible is another psychopath as well.
Those of us onto Turner love to read how much Turner is in pain and unable to change. This free blog of Turner's is his own private hell. So by all means, stay in your free blogger ghetto and censor away the more ribald comments.
I have followed the column for a long time. I sometimes admire Turner's work, but I am also critical because he seems to be an easy chair journalist, using only internet sources for the most part for his stories. I have encouraged him to go and talk to successful school districts to see what they are doing, but he does not leave his living room.
It took a lot of courage to write his book. Not intelligence, but courage. As an outsider, I could see the satire of Joplin Schools and their leaders. He crossed the line when his story told sex stories of the Superintendents. No matter your opinion of the former regime, it ventured into dangerous ground. Turner wrote a piece of fiction, but characters resembled his work environment.
Turner had guts, but also not intelligence to write this book. These people were his bosses and he crossed the line going into very personal allegations.
If Turner had been a truck driver and Turner wrote a semi-pornographic novel about his dispatcher and the owners of the company and they had found out Turner would have been fired.
Turner is simply a nasty bitter character who everyone sooner or later grows wise to and then he gets fired. The fact that Turner gets blacklisted is because Turner is really really nasty and those that fired him want to make sure that Turner stays gone throughout the regional industry.
Turner needs to move somewhere where they don't know him or where Turner's nastyness is common. Or stay here and suffer, even if not ever in silence.
If you idiots truly want to silence Turner and have him stop writing about the school system, the best way to do that would be to put him back on the faculty. You can talk about his book all you want, but only a handful of people read that book and probably not many more have read it since then. He never wrote anything negative about the school district on the Turner Report until they kicked him out of the classroom. I would be surprised if he would continue exposing all of the flaws in the district if he was put back to work. Still, why would the board hire him? Joplin doesn't need any more good teachers. The district can always find another Amanda Schweitzer.
If Turner had been a truck driver, he could have been fired and probably should have been fired if he wrote such a book. The thing is, Turner was not a truck driver. He worked in a position where he could not legally be fired for writing that book. That is why they kept on saying that Turner had every right to write that book. If anybody read it though he would lose his job. Then they discovered nobody had read it, so CJ and his lawyer said he 'dangled' it in front of them. So it did not matter if anyone ever read it as long as there was a one in a million chance that somebody could. It should also be noted and I get this from what Turner has written that he was advised by NEA to resign because Huff had it out for him and he was already looking for other jobs and had schools interested in him when Huff told the Joplin Globe about Turner's book and the Globe printed that Turner had written a book with strong sexual content without saying how they ever found out about this book, much less how they had any idea this book had something to do with Turner's suspension. CJ wasn't looking to get Turner out of Joplin, he was looking to punish him as much as he could. How did that work out for you, C. J?
Continuing that last thought, there was never any reason for the hearing or for Turner's character to be attacked. He was already halfway out the door, but that wasn't good enough for CJ. It looks like either CJ or someone else wants to continue punishing him. This nonsense about Turner's nastiness. He was always courteous as a teacher and as a human being. He doesn't have much nice to say about people like CJ, Besendorfer, Wallace Bajjali, Woolston, Ron Richard, Mike Landis, or Bruce Speck. It that makes him 'nasty" we could use a lot more nasty people in Joplin.
Turner's aloser and always has been.
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No one is going to hire Turner.
No newspaper.
No school district.
Nobody.
Everyone around here knows enough about Turner enough to know that nobody wants to go through all that again.
I certainly don't see anyone knocking down doors to hire Turner for anything. Furthermore, anyone who supports Turner is suspect and we don't need their type in our public schools.
We've got all the facts in and Turner has had his "due process" and knew better than to appeal the findings of fact and conclusions of law.
As a disgruntled loser kicked to the curb now on the outside, Turner does make up his own facts and expresses his own different liberal slant opinion suitable for this his caught disgruntled loser blog. So you other disgruntled losers like Turner who haven't got caught yet can bemoan that Turner got caught and the rest of us can take satisfaction that Turner will never be able to move on.
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