Your Tax Dollars at Work !

Michael Hicks was a teacher under stress. He had been promised new computers, a library of books and all sorts of supplies that never showed up. Money had been there. I helped put together several proposals for how the computer money was to be spent.

The money never came through… Never came through to his students, that is! Funny money issues seem to surround Kevin McCormack’s rise to power in District 75.

His class consisted of very junior-high-aged(12-14 yrs) students, classified as Emotionally Handicapped and thrown into a school that was set up to train older (16 to 21yrs) mentally-retarded students how to get jobs. The school was not equipped to handle these students, and the students clearly were not ready to deal with their new setting. These students were terrified that they were being classified as retarded because of their behavior. They began to complain, and to act out.

The situation became so out of hand and was so unfair to these students, that I sent off a letter of complaint to the chancellor stating that this set up was totally inappropriate… may have used the word “bizarre.”

The district got word of my letter. Kevin McCormack was pissed! But, I kept asking McCormack where all the money for these kids had gone. As time went by it became clear that Michael Hicks was convinced that these funds had gone to me and my students.
I was informed by someone from the district office, Beverly Kolestein, that this was actually “Mainstreaming” for these kids.

Mainstreaming used to mean placing handicapped students in regular classrooms with their higher-functioning peers. In District 75, “The Chancellor’s District” as it’s called – mainstreaming could mean anything the herd of paper-pushers at the district office wanted it to mean.

So you had already emotionally-disturbed children being treated in emotionally disturbing ways, they naturally resorted to their primary defense - acting out. You have a school that is not set up for this population. You have a principal who doesn’t know let alone care about anything except his next promotion. Then, you throw in a teacher who’s not properly prepared to meet the needs of these students and you have a volatile situation!
Mr. Hicks often marched his students through the hallways threatening them with a yardstick. He did no individualized instruction. He ran his class like it was the 1950’s with students taking turns doing computations on the blackboard as he chastised their abilities.

He began to let the larger students discipline the younger ones. They would go over to the student making a disruption and wallop them. The tried to do this in my computer lab and I was horrified. I not only put a stop to it, but began having these students create posters on the computer for the school’s Dean of Discipline.

These posters were for violence prevention explaining such methods as the Boil… Simmer… Cool System. They created colorful posters reminding students that they have a right to feel safe in school: No one is allowed to bully or hurt you etc. Mr. Hicks was angry I was working to undermine his authority!

One parent complained to me that her son had recently started beating on his younger siblings at home. I told her what I had seen the older students do to the younger ones to try to keep the class quiet. She was horrified. She wanted to confront Mr. Hicks. I told her to complain to Kevin McCormack, who according to a witness pointed the finger at me when he spoke to Mr. Hicks.

Guidance people eventually told Mr. Hicks to try rewards with these students. So as a “reward” he brought in a violent video game Bucket of Blood. After parent complaints, Mr. Hicks was made to remove this reward from his list of tried-and-true methods. Moreover, as part of a crackdown on what McCormack deemed unprofessional material, I was told to remove any and all computer games from my classroom.

I brought in articles I had written for professional journals showing how I used computer games for teaching on-the-job skills my students would need. I explained how the Board of Education had paid my expenses to present my research on computer games at the New England Educational Research Association Convention.

I had made a name for myself written the code for several games myself. They had proved quite successful with helping my students improve their overall performance. I tried to show how I went in and re-programmed commercial games to teach specific skills e.g. I changed the code in a Frogger-like game so that the students could only use the home keys they need to learn how to type.

An AP tried to intervene and suggested that I might know what I was doing, but she was over-ruled by Kevin McCormack. So I acquiesced, rather than risk charges of insubordination that would be grounds for dismissal. I agreed to remove the games, but kept using them to get students on task.

Michael Hicks was furious when he later found out that I was still getting away using computer games.

By now he was convinced that his computer money had been funneled off by me to run my computer lab. And he felt he found confirmation in the fact that Kevin McCormack began making me give my personal supplies to Mr. Hicks citing the usual shortage of funds because of “new restrictions by the District”

I was generous, even though most of these supplies had been bought from my personal Teachers’ Choice account and squirreled away by me over the years.
Other supplies, such as colored papers, I had bought on my own to meet the needs of my students I willing shared. Mr. Hicks was by now making his animosity toward me quite clear – however – to me meeting the needs of his student.

However, to Michael Hicks this was a sign of my weakness and proved I had taken funds that were rightfully his.

I have always been quite willing to go out of my way to help other teachers. Others had done a lot to help me out early on in my career. Such assistance is not totally free of serving my own self- interests: Problems in another teacher’s classroom have a way of undermining what you are trying to do in your own.

So I have always tried to help other teachers, and this you will see led to my eventual downfall at the hands of Mr. Hicks, with the tacit support of Kevin McCormack and eventually the support of people like Dudley Thompson, Michael Best and Richard Condon.All this will be explained in the next installment on Homophobia which I have saved for this year’s Gay Pride Weekend.