Tuesday, January 12, 2016

West Bend Strikes Again

By Jeff Simpson 

With the over abundance of testing in our public schools, there has been a movemento to limit testing that has even reached the White House.

While it is consuming the country, the one place it apparently has not reached is West Bend, WI.  The backwards land, represented so well by racist Republican Bob Gannon, is back at it again,

 A social studies teacher, Tanya Lohr, had some concerns about their new testing program called Galileo.  Ms. Lohr feels that there are some flaws in the system and wanted to address them with the administration.   In order to be heard, she did what our democracy affords her to do, she drew up a petition and had her fellow teachers sign it.

One Voice speaks louder than 100 individual voices.



However, as we explained earlier, this is West Bend, and the Administration and School Board of the district handled it like you would think they would.   They sat down with Ms, Lohr and discussed where she felt the problems were  and worked on ways to address them to make sure we are getting the most and best information about our kids when we are evaluating their progress.

They suspended Ms. Lohr with pay.

That sent a nice do not talk to us about your area of expertise, we do not want to hear it message to their staff!

That led to the packed house at the School Board meeting, where there was a huge show of support for Ms. Lohr.

In front of a packed West Bend School District School Board meeting Monday night, there was an outpouring of support for Lohr.
  • "This teacher puts her students` needs all ahead of her own," one parent said.
  • Some members of the community came to Lohr's defense, believing Lohr was doing what is best for the students.
"What is happening to our democracy when teachers are not allowed to circulate a petition?" Joy Schroeder said.
Kimberly Roemer launched her own petition, gathering 1,100 signatures to get Lohr back in the classroom. At Monday's school board meeting, she expressed her disgust toward district decision-makers.
"I think at this point, there`s very little concern about our teachers and our children," Roemer said.
After the outpouring, and another petition calling for Ms. Lohr to be reinstated, Republican activist and School Board President Randy Marquardt, reading a condescending and snarky statement,  announced that Ms. Lohr will be returning to her classroom.

“As you’re aware of the ongoing investigation into possible policy violations of a member of the high school. While no decision has been made regarding this matter it is clear from the information that has been supplied to this board there is significant and outright false information being published about this matter. By law the district unfortunately cannot address and correct the specific misleading or false information because as the employer the district does not have the same rights  as public employees to go public and share with others their version of the facts of the personnel matter.
This inability to publicly address the situation and correct the inaccurate information that’s being communicated by these individuals puts the district at a significant disadvantage.
This district can not utilize social media in the same manner and to the same extent as the supporters of the employee who apparently don’t care what the facts really are as long as they can blame the administration for the situation and absolve the employee of any responsibility for the choices she made regarding her own behavior.
The district holds all staff members to standards of behavior that this community has the right to expect of any employee of the district regardless of the subject matter of an interaction between a staff member and an administrator.
When the administration receives information that those standards may not have been upheld the board expects the administration will conduct a thorough investigation of the matter that is exactly what is happening here.
The board fully supports the administrative actions in investigating this situation.
Finally we also agree with the administration recommendation to place Miss Lohr back in her classroom immediately.”
(WBEA response to Mr. Marquardt is here).

I guess the School Board and Adminstration, want the children of West Bend, to grow up to be as ignorant as Bob Gannon.





2 comments:

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  2. The superintendent there supported ACT 10.

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