Posted on 02/23/2003 9:02:29 AM PST by bogeybob
WABI TV reported Friday that the Maine National Guard Family Assistance Center has received about 30 complaints from children of deployed soldiers concerning Principals, Teachers and Guidance Counselors reportedly demeaning the role of their deployed parent. Some children involved are 7 to 9 years of age.
Here is a letter written to a friend of mine from the Maine Army National Guard:
"Thank you for your interest on this most troubling matter. Our Family Assistance Centers have reported cases from Aroostook County to Southern Maine. We are reluctant to give out specific schools and the individuals involved in the interest of giving the education community a chance to address the problem itself. Also, parents wanted the opportunity to pursue the issue through their local school boards first.
In all, we have over thirty complaints that name schools and individual principals, teachers and guidance counselors. If one considers that these complaints come from just the parents who attended our briefings and only from children who told their parents, we are concerned that the problem may be more widespread than we know.
We are recording the complaints, and I will personally visit these educators to express our concern as a professional organization and ask for their cooperation.
Ultimately, our main concern and first responsibility is the safety of our children during these uncertain times. Maine has a core of dedicated and professional educators, but we will challenge any individual who places our children at risk due to their own political ideologies."
My problem, if you didn't get it in the first post, is two-fold: one, I don't believe it is ethical to run a story that libels an entire work force without examining the evidence; and two, I don't think that thoughtful, intelligent people should take what little real evidence there is and extrapolate that to the point where they paint all teachers - Mainers or otherwise - as socialists, or communists, or even anti-war.
When I refer to evidence, I mean that the reporters who investigated this should have searched out a teacher-offender to interview. This is not as hard as it seems. You just get your butt down to where the guardsmen are and start asking questions until you find someone whose child has been offended by a teacher. If the anti-military rhetoric is as prevalent as my fellow posters believe, it shouldn't be too hard to find someone to interview. I have a second job after school, so I rarely get to watch O'Reilly, but he claims to have looked into this. If so, has he used his vast resources (the same ones allegedly used to help bring down a terrorist cell) to find one of these teachers, or even one of the guardsmen, and interview them? I realize that the guardsmen probably have been told to avoid the press, and the offending teachers may not be willing to talk. In that case the reporter reports that he made contact, but the person was unwilling to comment. However, you'd be surprised at how eager even the guilty are to spill their guts to a reporter, especially a TV reporter. If you don't even attempt to find anyone, then you are just a lazy journalist.
Those of you responding to the articles should be careful about making assumptions about teachers in Maine. One of the first posts said that Maine was a very liberal state. While the city of Portland may be quite liberal, much of the rest of the state is not. We are actually fairly evenly divided politically. This is reflected in the union membership and in turn makes it difficult for the union to influence politics much.
Although the MEA endorsed Baldacci, I don't get the impression that he feels he owes us much and in truth, he probably doesn't. I don't believe we brought him all that many votes with our endorsement. In fact, the governor recently appointed a former school superintendent as commissioner of education instead of another woman recommended by the MEA.
So much for political clout.
As for the war, I support the President, but I am not so naive as to believe we are going to Iraq simply to prevent terrorism. This war, like most, is really about money and maintaining the status quo. I happen to like the status quo and will not be sad to see a regime change. And if we are the ones to change it, then we should reap the benefits. In this case, oil.
I would tell my student to respond back in a very polite, professional manner but...I would not expect my student to sit and listen to dribble from a leftie. It would be the right of the student to express free speech and I would certainly support my student to do that ESPECIALLY when her/his mom, dad or sibling is fighting for our freedoms. It works both wah Teach....both ways.
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