Dear George,
Another school year is
drawing to a close. Of course, the
ne’er-do-wells and the scofflaws are always griping about the school system,
harkening back to some imagined golden era. Well, that’s just a bunch of sour grapes. I’ve been keeping track of news stories
about the local schools right here in America’s heartland, and I can tell you
some very inspiring things are going on.
Here’s just a sampling of the uplifting stories I’ve run across in the Cincinnati
Enquirer. All of these are real, though names have been changed to
protect the innocent.
We Southwest Ohioans are
fortunate to have dedicated teachers who rely on Midwestern family values in order
to instill truth and morality in their pupils. The best example is eighth grade science teacher Jon
Frishwatter of Mount Vernon, OH, who has creatively infused his otherwise
boring science curriculum with fascinating ideas from fundamentalist Christian
doctrine (1). Always the advocate
of critical thinking, Frishwatter states that his goal as a science teacher is
to generate skepticism toward modern science. Thus he keeps a stack of Bibles
available on his classroom desk and supplies a Christian rendition of topics
like evolution and homosexuality.
Some parents complained that Frishwatter went too far when he started
burning crucifixes into his students’ arms. However, the community should tolerate a certain degree of
over-enthusiasm when it’s in the pursuit of eternal truth.
While our fundamentalist
teachers are innovative, this doesn’t mean that they’re wishy-washy. To the contrary, many enforce rigorous
standards. Take the example of Christoff
Robersan who teaches at Camp Ehrnst Middle School in Broone County. Robersan
not only runs a tight ship in the classroom, but he extends his teaching
techniques to his child-rearing as well.
Just recently he was arrested for beating his son with a leather belt
because the son wasn’t successful in hopping on one foot on a cul-de-sac
(2). He also beats his son with a
belt if the son doesn’t swim fast enough, doesn’t clean his room completely, or
gets a low grade at school.
Confronted with the many bruises on the boy’s body, Robersan explained
that they come from falling down at the swimming pool. The local judge acquitted him,
concluding that Robersan may be a strict disciplinarian, but there’s no crime
in that.
In my day Gym teachers were
the strictest, and I’m glad to see that’s still the case. Veteran St.
Bernard-Elmwood Place gym teacher Rich Stabler got into trouble when he hit one
of his female students in the head with a basketball (3). Later he smacked another unruly male
student with a basketball as well.
Stabler’s lawyer argued that the school board was just punishing the
coach because he hadn’t given enough playing time to a board member’s
child. Besides, the lawyer argued,
the school’s soccer coach smacked a player in the face with a water bottle,
then required the whole team to undress in the parking lot after they lost a
game. Nothing had been done to
him. The judge ruled that there’s
no law in the state of Ohio that says that teachers can’t throw basketballs at
their students’ heads.
In this era of standardized
testing, our local teachers are dedicated to enhancing their students’
performance. A paragon is math
teacher Scott Muylers of Charles Seppelt Elementary School in suburban Milford
(4). Muylers regularly uses study
guides to prepare his students for upcoming tests, and he has found that they
are most effective when the study guide contains exactly the same items in the
same order as the questions on the state exam. Some of the children, ingrates that they are, were confused
by this and complained to other teachers.
Mr. Muylers was suspended for three months, but we’re sure that he will
be back to continue his excellent methods next year.
Modern technology has has
opened up lots of rewarding communication between teachers and students. Mason H.S. gym teacher Stacey Schuller
(5) is a prime example since she frequently texts her students after class
hours. Apparently some parents
must have misinterpreted this because the city police charged Ms. Schuller with
“inappropriate text messages,” and she has been ordered to stay away from
school grounds and to have absolutely no contact with students. As it turned out, she has also been
sleeping with five of the school’s football players. But isn’t that what texting is all about?
In nearby West Chester
there’s also been some official misunderstanding of a teacher’s creative use of
technology (6). Just because fifth
grade teacher Ryan Falkenkamp takes his male students on trips out of town,
gives them alcohol, takes art photographs of their private parts, and stores
the results on his school-issued laptop computer for later sharing with men
across the country, the FBI has chosen to investigate Falkenkamp’s caring
relation with his students. High
school students, of course, are even more adept at new uses for technology than
are their teachers. When Mason
school authorities confiscated a male student’s cell phone for using it during
school hours, they found nude photos of several of his 15-year-old female
classmates (7). Stodgy as they
are, school officials petitioned the Ohio State legislature to update laws to
be more attuned to modern
technology.
Contemporary students, far
from being passive or alienated, bring positive energy to their schools. Often this takes the form of amusing
pranks. In Lockland, for example,
twenty senior students, most of them top athletes and cheerleaders, snuck into
school at night, planning to move all of the books from the library to the
cafeteria (8). Finding the library
locked up, they instead sprinkled rubber bands on the stairways, hung posters
about their “Class of Dimes”, and began filling Dixie Cups with water to place
in the corridors. Police officers,
tipped off by neighbors entered with drawn guns and K-9 dogs; then chased down,
caught, and handcuffed the fleeing students. One boy was held at Taser point; another was treated by a
paramedic squad for a panic attack.
Horrified parents complained that this was simply a senior prank and
that at least one mother had driven her son to the school to participate. The police, however, said, “It’s not
amusing to us. We take this very,
very serious.”
Three teens in Mason came
up with the amusing idea of disconnecting the heating blocks from all of the
system’s school buses on a frigid January morning (9). Much to the joy of their classmates,
all classes were cancelled. It did
cost the school about $300,000 lost in salaries, wasted food, etc. but these
children will probably grow up to be CEO’s in the banking industry. While we know it’s not politically
correct to joke about terrorist threats these days, a 15-year-old Madeira H.S.
student told various classmates that he had a gun and intended to kill 20 of
his classmates who had been bullying him (10). The police found a lot of guns in his home, but they were
locked up securely, and they couldn’t find his list of twenty names (10). Maybe the kid kept the list in his
head.
There’s a lot of discussion
these days about bullying in the schools, and we are proud to see that
Cincinnati area schools are holding their own. A typical case occurred when fifteen-year-old DeWayne Moolis
was listening to music while riding home at the back of his Middletown High
School bus and three fellow schoolmates grabbed him from behind, held a
cigarette lighter flame to his face, pulled back his hood, and then lit his
hair on fire. The fire burned down
to the scalp, and his outraged mother said that if he’d used gel on his hair
his head would have caught fire.
The perpetrators, a freshman and two juniors, were charged with
aggravating menacing, assault, and arson and are currently being held in the
juvenile detention center. DeWayne
decided to get a haircut
It’s not only local students
and teachers who are performing admirably, but staff members are part of the
upbeat school culture as well.
This is important because the schools face such grave fiscal
difficulties, and innovative thinking is crucial. Take the case of the cooks at New Britain schools who found
that boll weevils had built nests in the packages of noodles used for school
lunches (12). Rather than waste
precious money on new noodles, the cooks painstakingly picked out the boll
weevils one by one, then carefully boiled the noodles before serving them to
the children. The principal said
that eating boll weevils won’t harm children, though he did admit that official
policy was to not serve food containing insects.
School staff members have
more fun on the job than do teachers.
Southeast School bus driver Jon Datthelmer of Harrison gets a big kick
out of his job (13). After dropping
off his load of 33 high school band members at a basketball game, Datthelmer,
whose blood alcohol level was six times the legal limit, crashed his bus head
on into two pickup trucks.
Datthelmer was suspended last year for driving with beer on his bus, was
convicted of drunk driving in Hamilton County, and was suspended for aiming his
school bus at a school janitor.
The students think he’s a cool cat.
All in all, I’d have to say
it’s very reassuring to discover that all these stimulating things are going on
in Cincinnati area schools. It
almost makes me want to be a kid again.
Love,
Dave
Sources: 1, Cinc. Enquirer, 1-12-11; 2, www.nky.com, 8-23-10; 3, Cinc. Enquirer, 8-25-09; 4, Cincinnati.com,
3-5-11; 5, www.cincinnati.com,
1-28-11; 6, www.cincinnati.com,
1-13-11; 7, Cincinnati Enquirer, 3-4-09; 8, Cincinnati Enquirer, 3-4-09; 9, Cincinnati Enquirer,
2-19-09; 10, www.cincinnati.com,
1-27-11; . 11, Cincinnati.com, 4-5-11; 12, Cinc Enquirer, 1-12-11; 13, Cincinnati Enquirer,
10-15-10.
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