yes

I guess I am still a young and dumb idealist. A lot of the comments that I have read in this thread sadden me. Because of past transgressions you have all accepted hatred. You are perpetuating the cycle because it happened to you.

My faith in humanity has never been strong, but to see intelligent and educated individuals shrug at this situation breaks my heart. I'll be crawling back into my cave that is the "picture" forum.

Query: how does accepting the reality that there are people out there who are bad at the job of teaching and/or have awfull personalities translate to "perpetuating the cycle"?
Err... While you're at it: what's "perpetuating the cycle" in this context?

"Accepting the reality" is fine. Using the reality that there are shitty people as an excuse to not direct energy and effort at improving the situation and punish the shitty people when they get caught, not so much.

In this instance, what energy and effort should I put forward? Not my kid, my school, my district. I know no one involved. Should I sign an online petition no one will care about? Should I sit at home and feel sad about it? Should I drive to that state and beat the crap out of the teacher? What about all the pieces of crap that are closer to me that I don't beat the crap out of because I'm busy worrying about this particular one far away? Are they less crappy because they aren't on Youtube?

When people treated me like crap in high school, I made them understand that it wasn't ok. In many cases, I did that through broken bones and face to face conversations with concrete sidewalks. If an employee of mine treated someone crappy, I would deal with it. If someone is a prick, I don't deal with them. I don't know what I'm supposed to do to fix the fundamental nature of humanity, though, nor do I know what I'm supposed to do to fix the behavior of some random person far from myself.

You're supposed to make youtube videos, rant on message boards, and repost to your facebook wall. Standing up for yourself is for suckers.

The district responds by saying everyone heard on the recording is no longer with the school district.

The response from the father is here.



The Werefrog agree with what the father claims he wants. He doesn't want to fight the district. He is happy that they took swift action. He is simply angry that the one who ultimately should be held responsible is still working for the district, and he proves it.

it does anger The Werefrog that we don't have protections in place for this sort of thing. Such a teacher should not be allowed to be moved to a different location, in this case, the high school of the district. That teacher should not be allowed a teaching certificate anymore. The Werefrog do not necessarily believe the teacher should be arrested, but fired with a revocation of teacher's certificate would be a fair consequence. Naturally, we don't revoke the certificate until the investigation is completed and the teacher is found guilty of the accusation; during investigation, it's leave of absence pending investigation.

At one point, a teacher's aide called the kid a bastard, sounded like under her breath - "Aiken, you little bastard" or something like that.

At one point the kid asked a question, which was muddled in the recording, and the teacher responded with "no" in an automatic-negation kind of way that some kids use. The father then explained that the kid's question was the heavy, emotionally fraught question that would legitimately lead to the kid being panicked -- essentially asking if he would (ever) see his father again after his visitation with his mother that weekend. I'm not at all convinced, from the audio, that the teacher understood the question she was answering (or cared). A bit later, as the kid is working himself into a tizzy, there is a moment when someone laughs, but it's unclear what they are laughing at.

Beyond that, it was objectionable but not abusive, like the idiot teacher's aide talking to another adult about her having been hungover that morning, and just generally being curt and short with the kid.

I think there was plenty in that audio to get rid of the teacher's aide. She was verbally abusive. Not so sure about the other adults. From what I understand, that's exactly what the school did when they heard the tape -- fired the teacher's aide and moved the teacher out of that classroom.

All in all, it sounded like a complicated mess that's going to end up paying lawyers, but there wasn't the smoking gun that the father wanted us to hear so we could join his bandwagon to get every adult in that classroom fired. To investigate, yes, and maybe to fire, which is what the school did. That's a big thing, firing someone, especially if they are a good employee/teacher in other ways.

Agreed. We've gone to bat for our eldest, and pulled him out of a hoity-toity private school that was a bloody mess, to put him in the local public school, which has been excellent.

However, my first step in dealing with problems is to teach him how to deal with the problem himself -- to avoid it, to confront it, to defend himself. When he's ready, I'll be teaching him martial arts, too.

None of this really applies to the kid in the video, though (depending on his level of functioning, which is not revealed), as autism makes spotting (essentially social) trouble, avoiding it, or dealing with it difficult if not impossible at that age.

Gotcha. I don't use facebook or post on youtube, but I'll try to muster up a rant.