Revivication

THIS FORMER TEACHER WAS SCHEDULED TO SPEAK AT THE WASHINGTON STATE HOUSE ED. COMMITTEE MEETING, WHICH CONVENIENTLY CUT HIM OUT UNTIL HE INTERRUPTED THE CLOSING AND INSISTED HE BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK. CONSEQUENTLY, HE WROTE THE THESIS BELOW AND MAILED IT TO THEM. THIS IS WELL WORTH READING TO UNDERSTAND TEACHER ABUSE AND WHITE CHALK CRIME AND HOW THE CYCLE OF TEACHER ABUSE LIVES ON AND PERPETUATES WHITE CHALK CRIME AND OUR FAILED SCHOOLS. NAPTA

Rep. Dave Quall
Chair, House Education Committee

Chairman Quall and members of the House Education Committee, Do you know what Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder (PDSD) is? It is a psychological condition that is a near-cousin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an issue for our soldiers; PDSD is an issue for the victims (and relatives of victims) of bullying. Just as a backfiring engine can trigger a PTSD episode for a soldier, so a perceived “return to the battlefield” can induce a PDSD episode. That is precisely what happened at the close of the Education Committee hearing Friday morning. Being “lost in the paperwork”, being dismissed and ignored, triggered a flashback to the “dark days” of being bullied at my former school. Another word for “flashback” is “revivication”, reliving the event. As I rose to object to being ignored, I was reliving the bullying that I experienced at MMS, my former school. You saw a clear example of the lasting effects of bullying on the victim. That is precisely my point. It doesn’t matter whether the victim is a child or an adult; bullying causes long-term psychological, physiological and behavioral damage. Period. The Legislature has the power to begin to stop all bullying in the schoolhouse. What are you going to DO about it?

I am sorry if I disturbed the decorum of the hearing, but you may understand our (victims) position on adult bullying after you read further. This is, necessarily, a long letter. I apologize, but if you are to have an informed discussion and make an informed decision, you need to know what life is like for the victim. Please be assured that I am only giving you the highlights; there is much more detail to this story. Of the many bullying weapons used against us by the principal and his mob at MMS, one of the most widespread was ignoring us and our input with a frequent dismissive, “that’s just your perspective,” with a sneer in the voice. The quality curriculum that we senior staffers presented to students was marginalized and limited (my wife and I routinely mentored students to placements at the Washington State National History Day exhibit-we had one student take first place in her category and qualify to go to nationals in Washington, D.C. in 2005); less rigorous curriculum presented by younger staff was highly praised. Then there was the “silent treatment” where the office manager would not speak to us (preferring a facial sneer that said, “you are less that trash”) or provide professional services until we started the conversation and responded with as few words as she could, which were delivered as if we were the scum of the earth (or she would sneer at us that she was busy and she’d put it in our mail box later, as if we had interrupted her important work with our totally unimportant work). We were not called on during faculty meetings unless it couldn’t be helped otherwise. When we were allowed to speak, all of our suggestions and input were met with derision. In light of this treatment, perhaps you can see how not being allowed to speak to the Committee after driving all the way from Richland would be upsetting and trigger a flashback.

The basis of bullying is an imbalance of power. Whether children or adults, the more “powerful” may try to dominate, even humiliate, the weaker. Teachers in a bullying situation take a lot of garbage. Here are a few more examples, none of which happened to me but rather to others in my building. The run-on sentence structure is used in a deliberate attempt to evoke anxiety in the reader, just as the bullying does. You are assigned 39 students for your Japanese language (talk about rigorous curriculum!) elective (you are about to become a KCTS9 Golden Apple winner), but you only have 32 chairs and 33 books and have mentioned this in passing to another teacher and the next day you received word of your award and the principal pulls you into his office and you think that he will praise you for your accomplishment but he and the counselor yell at you for complaining in public about not having enough books. Or: you notice that three days after the resignation of another senior staffer (in early October!), the principal begins to behave oddly toward you and within a week is openly committing bullying acts toward you (serial bullies do that-get rid of one target then focus on the next one on the list). Or: the principal decides that your years-long successful for-high-school-credit (the only one in the district) biology class has to have 27 students in it even though you only chose 19 through your selective process which assures that all students will be able to keep up with the advanced work load (you are a KCTS9 Golden Apple nominee and winner of a Toyota grant that allows your honors students to hook up to a NASA data stream), so he assigns 8 students that you have previously turned down and 7 of them fail your class even though you gave up your lunch period for two trimesters to tutor them AND THEN the principal blames YOU for their failure and calls you a bad teacher in front of your peers. Or: the principal warns you, as a senior staff member, that you need to be in your room in the morning to monitor the students and help them with their work (but don’t forget to read and respond to all of your e-mails!) while the junior staff members sit in the faculty room drinking coffee and eating donuts. Or: you go to the principal with a clarifying question about implementation of the new online grade book and he goes ballistic, yelling at you, pointing his finger at you, telling you, “I don’t like your attitude!” and when you try to withdraw from the situation, he yells, “No, we’re going to take care of this right now!”, threatening you with the reminder “Don’t forget that I’m your evaluator” AND he yells and threatens you in the same way one month later in the presence of the vice principal who seems appalled and you invoke your Weingarten rights to have a union rep present and the principal refuses and continues to yell at you until you insist on representation at which point he finally disengages. Or: five behavior disordered students (all boys) are assigned to your last period class when both you and they are at low energy points and you have a daily struggle with discipline and the rest of the class is not learning because you are spending most of your time disciplining these five students and halfway through the year you find out that the counselor had left specific instructions the previous summer that these five boys should NEVER be assigned to a class with any other of the five and the ONLY other person with scheduling authority is the principal. There is more; so much more. Why do teachers put up with this? Because the principal has all the power and they have none. We were told by an upper level administrator that the principal can talk to you anytime, anywhere, and in any manner that they see fit and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is a well known axiom in the teaching profession that the principal is God and that running afoul of him/her can mean being subjected to bullying. It is education’s dirty little secret.

How can this be corrected? Where is the power to stop this? Only in the Legislature. I ask again, “What are YOU going to DO?”

I hope that you can begin to understand how I felt Friday. After signing up second to speak to HB 2801, listening to input on two other bills which had some interesting connections to 2801 which I was noting for my remarks, having four people called up (excuse me?, I signed up second), remembering conspiracy theories about derailing political speech, then having it announced that there would be two more speakers (oh, that would be Steve Zuber, the first one to sign up, and me, wouldn’t it? It’s all good then.), and finally to have two OTHER people called up to speak, I was right back in my old school being ignored again. Being put down. Being marginalized. Perhaps you can better see how a flashback can take over. Instantly. The physiological effects of being bullied reappeared: my heart began to pound, my stomach began to ache, and I remembered having to stop the car on the way to school to vomit because of the anxiety caused by the constant bullying.

I am not, however, someone who will just slink away. Unlike other teachers who have been bullied out of their jobs who simply crawl away as damaged human beings and will not revisit those times, I understand that no problem will be solved by ignoring it. I was the kid in class who asked the dumb questions because the kid next to me needed it to be answered and was afraid to look stupid. This is not the first time I have been the only one to stand up; I’m sure it will not be the last. The bullying will not stop unless someone like me stands up and says, “This is wrong.” THIS is now my job. Bullying of teachers is knowingly inflicted by principals. It is wrong. It must stop. Furthermore, student bullying will not stop if adults are allowed to be bullied in the schoolhouse.

You may not think that adult bullying is a problem because you may only rarely hear about it. The system is set up so that you don’t. I was essentially coerced into signing a “settlement agreement” which requires me to not discuss what was done to me. I regularly violate that agreement now because I have come to realize that it was just another bullying tactic to keep me quiet and the public, and you, ignorant. If the district wants to come after me, they’ll have to explain the three hundred documents that I have detailing their treatment of the senior staff at MMS. At another point in this saga, the district signed out “no trespass” orders against my wife and me; they were apparently afraid of us “contaminating” our former colleagues even though we were living 220 miles away in Richland. They stationed a police car in the parking lot to keep us away. My picture was shown to staff as if I were some criminal. A teacher who didn’t know me conducted intruder drills with her students, in case I showed up. They held an “emergency” faculty meeting and threatened our former colleagues with firing if they talked to us using district equipment. Of course, the clear message was that it didn’t matter what equipment was used, we were dangerous people to talk to and if they wanted a job, they should not talk to us.

I know of several bullied former teachers who are now basically hermits; they can’t stand to go out in public because of the way they were treated. Most victims just try to stuff those experiences in a small corner of their brain and hope to ignore them forever. If we try to explain what happened to us, people think that we are crazy: “I can’t believe that a principal would do that!!” It’s hard to bring education to those who choose to ignore the facts.

If you’re still reading, thanks! One of the ironic things about being a victim of bullying is that if you stand up for yourself or your colleagues, you are often dismissed by your bully as “disgruntled.” “He’s just a disgruntled employee.” It’s intended as another put down; it’s dismissive and has the effect of trivializing anything you might say in your defense. Any response to it makes you look crazy. The bully will spread this lie as far as they can to try to insulate themselves from their actions. Look it up in the dictionary. “Disgruntled” means “to be made angry.” So while the bullies are dismissing you as some kind of “disgruntled” psychotic, they are actually admitting that they have done something TO YOU to make you angry and psychotic. Quite a racket; push people around until they lose control and then point at them, laugh, and say, “Oh look, they’re just crazy.”

And that is exactly how bullying is used. The whole plan of attack for the administrator is to create enough chaos and havoc in the life of the teacher that they will go away on their own. Thus the frequent admonition from the principal and his mob, “If you don’t like it here, you can go someplace else.” The administrator doesn’t have to go to the trouble of proving that the teacher is incompetent; the targeted teacher isn’t usually incompetent, but is more likely to be one of the stronger teachers in the building. It is done for the “fear factor.” I had several colleagues come to me and ask, “If they can do that to YOU, what can they do to ME?” When a dictator takes over a country, they kill a few hundred or a few thousand or a few hundred thousand people so the rest of the population gets the message that you don’t mess with this guy. It’s the same with a bullying administrator; drive off a couple of good teachers and the rest will be quaking in their boots and do whatever you want them to do. And you know what? It works! I was speaking for the umpteenth time to the union president about the situation, and he blurted out in total frustration, “You’re the only one here complaining!” “Exactly,” I responded, “Bullying works!! I am the union rep and I am supposed to know what’s happening to my people. It’s not my fault that they are too afraid to come to you.” Fight, flight or camouflage; those are your three options. But the cost to the teachers-the targeted ones and the survivors-is high, no matter which route you choose.

One of the targeted teachers, who was in her late 40’s-early 50’s, had a pulmonary embolism just before the beginning of the school year, nearly died, stayed three weeks in intensive care, was off work for months and only returned to part time work since she never regained her strength. Another had to have esophageal surgery (probably caused by stress induced by the bullying) right after she “retired” early. A third “retired” for “medical reasons” in the middle of the first year the principal was in the building. Quality teachers leaving students with a less than quality education; that’s what bullying gives the citizens of Washington State. The WASL scores for that building fell as the senior staff was bullied out of the building; they have yet to recover three years later. Even those who were not targeted were affected. Several teachers refused to even walk with us in the hallways for fear of being the next victim. This choice further isolates the victim and creates more psychological damage. I needed to seek help from a psychologist to navigate this mess. Halfway through our FIRST session, he said to me, “We see a lot of this anxiety and anger in teachers who are being bullied by their principals.” Good Lord! “We see a lot of this?” This guy worked for Far West, a psychological services firm that contracts out to school districts for services for district employees. “We see a lot of this?” He later offered to testify should I ever go to court over my treatment by the district.

That having been said, we know that MOST administrators are good people who care about their students and faculty as well. My son’s father-in-law and step mother-in-law are school principals of excellent ability and reputation. Most teachers are good and hard working people, too, but yes, there are some who are bullies and should be told so. I worked with a couple of them. They should be retrained or removed from the classroom just as the bullying administrator should be retrained or removed. Note that the first step suggested is education, not unemployment. My wife has worked for seven good to excellent administrators, six of them in that building before this bully came along. But it only took two years to destroy the respectful and democratic processes and atmosphere and install a dictatorship with a leader, a group of followers (the proposed definition of a gang pretty well fits what we had: three or more people, with leadership and a clear organization, committing criminal acts), a group of targets, and everybody else in the building trying to hide. Even the custodians used their seniority to work the evening shift so that they minimized the time they had to deal with the principal! The union was helpless because there are no laws or contract language; the timing of events indicated that upper administration either openly or tacitly approved of the bullying. The repeated chorus of “If you don’t like it here, you can go someplace else” began in the “welcoming” speech of the new superintendent in August 2003 and grew louder, more frequent, and more public as time went on.

Do teachers somehow NOT DESERVE OR NEED to be protected? Are we magically going to be OK just because we are adults? Dead wrong. If victims don’t go so far as to harm themselves or others (and they are five times more likely to harm themselves than others), they will suffer the effects of bullying for years to come. Lots of people are working out psychological and behavioral issues from abuse of decades ago. Who DOESN’T want to include teachers? Let them stand up in front of the Committee and explain themselves. What possible reason could you have to NOT protect the people who are in charge of our children 7 ½ hours a day? Who wants to maintain the power imbalance and leave teachers vulnerable to this abuse? How do they sleep at night? We have been trying to find out who is opposed to protecting teachers but we have been left with no answers. If we could address these skeptics, we might be able to change their minds, but they seem to be protected from disclosure.

Once the bully is turned loose, the entire climate of the school changes. Once the bully has marked his territory by attacking one staff member, everybody hides. Survival is a matter of fight, flight, or camouflage. Flight and camouflage are the more popular routes. Transfer to another building or district; just get out of there anyway you can. So what the bully says is correct: “If you don’t like it here, you can go someplace else.” But that’s not really true. When I DID try to go somewhere else, the principal failed to fill out a recommendation form that simply required eleven check marks until after the hiring season was over. Abuse of power, after abuse of power, after abuse of power. I read a statistic once noting that about 50% of teachers live within fifty miles of their birthplace. So the administrator who tells you to go “someplace else” is essentially ostracizing you from your life-long community. That’s pretty nervy.

Camouflage takes two forms: 1) blending into the wall and 2) blending into the pack. Most of the teachers tried to steer clear of the bully and their mob as well as their targets. People refused to be seen with us. They stayed in their rooms during lunch period rather than be seen talking to either the mob or the targets. Members of the mob talked openly of “deadwood teachers.” Ironically, our WASL scores were better than theirs (yes, that information can be disaggregated, or at least the principal wants you to think so). One reported conversation had the mob talking about how poorly certain other teachers dressed; this was interesting since most of them were not Saville Row types, either. While the principal was publicly advocating collaboration and collegiality, he was actually destroying any hope of it. On the other hand, there were those who joined the bullying pack. In the presence of a bully, some people let their inner bully lose or they play at being a part of the pack to save themselves from being targeted.

THIS IS PROBABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION YOU CAN LEARN FROM THIS LETTER. Bullying reduces the capacity to learn and teach. We have all these rules and regs to try to create a “safe” school. A “safe” school allows the student to get out of their brain stem and do higher level thinking. We know this and understand it but we don’t practice it if we let the bullying adult loose in the school. I used to do a demonstration on the third day of class. I carried a large book in my hand and would walk around the room talking about expectations or the weather or anything that came to mind. Suddenly, I would slam the book down on a desk to make a large noise. There would be physical reactions, gasps, screams, and then guilty laughter. I would then make the point that the sudden noise had put them into their brain stem-fight or flight. How could they expect to learn anything while they are crawling under the desk to get away from danger? They need to feel safe and I will try to do my best; if there is any reasonable thing I can do for them to make them feel safer, let me know. Occasionally, they did.

The same holds true for teachers. Teachers who are not in a “safe” environment cannot teach effectively if they need to constantly look for ways to get away from the bully. It is that simple. Bullying reduces the ability to learn and teach. How can you possibly think that effective teaching can be done while the bully is loose in the school? This is a “walk the talk” argument; kids sniff out fake very quickly. If they see a teacher being bullied (they aren’t stupid, both my wife and I had students come to us and say, “Is Mr. H bullying you, too?”), they will not feel “safe.” They will know that the “safe” school concept is a lie. Then they tune out school, stay home, risk gang behaviors, etc. and the Legislature will come back and say “What happened? Why did this fail?"

Let’s not forget here that we are not talking about using bullying as a tool to get rid of “bad” teachers. There are procedures for that; if you want to argue for changes in that system, let the administration and unions look at those procedures for effectiveness and simplicity, but don’t try to argue that bullying is a good way to “clear out the deadwood.” It isn’t used for that most of the time. We are talking about principals who have a psychological need for power and use bullying as a way to show their power. A targeted teacher is not one who “deserves” to be bullied any more than an autistic child “deserves” it. A teacher is targeted because s/he is a threat to the principal-is more popular with staff and students, is the union rep, knows more about education, doesn’t kiss up, etc. It has little, if anything, to do with competence.

How quickly can this all happen? Our abuse began in the spring of 2003. By the time I left MMS in March 2006, the gang included the principal and his chief enforcer-the office manager, both of my teaching “teammates” (I was literally sandwiched between them in the middle of three rooms), the other union building rep (!), and four or five other members of the “in” crowd. On Day One, my English teammate (who had less teaching experience than me and who carpooled to work with the chief enforcer/office manager [attacks were obviously coordinated during the commute]) and I were assigned to coordinate our curriculums. She presented me with the course syllabus for her English class and when I asked where she was leaving room to support me in my National History Day curriculum as the previous (senior and bullied into retirement) teacher had, She told me that I wasn’t supposed to be doing NHD (with her nose in the air as if mentioning it raised a foul odor)-that eighth grade was going to do that; I just looked at her and laughed. My wife was eighth grade social studies and I knew for a FACT that they haven’t even had the conversation much less come to a decision; in the end, my wife did NHD and the others chose to do easier work. So much for collaboration, except that English had the gall to ask me several months later to teach her district-required unit on Shakespeare because she “doesn’t understand it” and “you’re in theatre so you can do it.” The other union rep, in the meantime, had tried to get me to resign as union rep because I was “too upset” by being moved from eighth grade to seventh (for no educationally valid reason, mind). At one point, she chaffed and denied being an “administrative lackey” (her words) when she resurrected a failed plan of the principal’s to impose sanctions on teachers for committing specific “offenses” which were obviously directed at specific targeted teachers. With the other pack members, the school was not a “safe” place to be. Suspicion was everywhere; it permeated the air. The place was poison. Even the annual “climate survey” showed it, even though bullies and union denied it.

I was not the first to leave; I was in fact, the fifth or possibly the sixth to leave due to bullying and possible sexual harassment. I WAS, however, the first to go loudly. From the end of the 2005 school year to the end of the 2006 school year, fourteen people left the building out of about 45 faculty and staff; I was kicked out, the principal was politely put on a leave of absence (only to appear a year later as a finalist for an upper administrative job), the office manager was told “to go somewhere else” (sweet justice, that), another senior teacher “retired” early; several others went to other districts or just left education altogether.

And the bullying didn’t stop with the exit of our bully; the next principal took up right where our bully left off, bullying one transferring teacher (who was bullied at HIS previous school in the district) from the first day of teacher prep days and utilizing my former “teammates” to spy on him and report any questionable remarks or comments to her as she wrote up a stream of disciplinary paperwork, even scheduling a “counseling” session with him on Thanksgiving Day! By the end of October, he was very distraught over his situation. In speaking to him, I presented his two options: stay and be miserable or leave and save his sanity. He left. She also continued to bully my wife, who worked until December when she hit 60 and, as a PERS I employee, “retired” early. Any district explanation of the bully as a “rogue” employee clearly was false to anyone who took the time to look at the facts.

But the people with the power were the people who were encouraging, possibly even planning the bullying. Power is everything in bullying. I had no chance of surviving once I had been targeted because I had no power. That’s what unions are for-to help balance the power between the boss and the employee-but in this case, all the power rests with the bully. The only power that I had was in the collection of documents that I kept recording our treatment. I saved e-mails from colleagues, minutes from faculty meetings, proposals that were made by the principal and how he retaliated when he was voted down. I wrote contemporaneous accounts of incidents I had endured and how I felt as well as notes on what others told me. My wife and a couple other targets also documented. It was the documentation that brought down the principal and office manager. When the existence of the documentation came to light during the “investigation” of me, the entire focus shifted. But the “investigator” refused to actually look at the documents, which I found odd. Perhaps if they found out too much, they would have to fire one of their own.

My wife and I had secretly agreed that ’05-’06 would be our last year at MMS. No one else knew. The bullies were wasting their time on us that final year and they didn’t even know it. We planned to move to Richland where we intended to retire anyway and try to get contracts and work the last five or six years before retirement. But both of us were too damaged to work under contract. Neither of us returned to the classroom. Between us, we had ten or eleven more good years of quality teaching. At 140 students each per year, 2800 students will not receive the level of education that we were providing. And you wonder why schools are “failing”?

But I had the misfortune to overhear a conversation in which the principal and office manager threatened two students with the punishment of going to the principal’s house dressed in matching coveralls (for the humiliation factor) and rototilling his yard for “screwing off for the last two years.” They laughed nervously at him and the principal said, “Don’t laugh. We’re serious.” Fight, flight or camouflage. Fight it was. This was the second incident I had witnessed in which the principal bullied students; I had heard of one other from another teacher. THIS HAS TO STOP. I will not allow students to be treated this way, if I can help it. In a very public way, I demanded that the bullying treatment of me stop. I was immediately removed from the classroom, coerced into signing the “settlement agreement” and fired. Other less inflammatory words were used, but I was fired for trying to protect students from being bullied.

I don’t regret the course that I took. I might have made minor changes in the fine points, but (except for the linger effects of the PDSD) I’m OK with the way it worked out. I regret that the district chose another bully to be principal, but that is not on my conscience; they will have to live with theirs. While I was working at MMS, I swore that I would try to save as many teachers as I could. In August 2005 a teammate had to make a choice: one more year of bullying or retirement. She asked my advice. I asked her if she thought that the bullying would be better or worse; when she replied, “Worse,” I told her to go enjoy her grandchildren and enjoy retirement. She felt guilty for “leaving” me with the bullies, but six months later, she told me it was the best thing she ever did. I believe I can take credit for “saving” the entire staff from the first bully. Not my fault that the administrators hired another one. Part of their plan, I figure.

But I will not allow this practice to stand. I will do everything in my power to prevent another student or teacher from being bullied in the schoolhouse. We will not stop. We shall overcome.

Thank you. Sorry this was so long. Feel free to call. But I don’t expect it because you are all very busy with the short session.

Richard Reuther
Richland, WA 99354

Breaking the Silence, Overcoming the Problem of Principal Mistreatment of Teachers; Jo Blase and Joseph Blase; Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA; 2003.
An academic study of principals abusing teachers conducted by two University of Georgia education professors. Extensive listing and discussion of destructive physiological, psychological and behavioral effects of bullying.


The Black Hole in the Blueprint, Teacher Abuse in San Diego Schools; Janice Howes; Self Published; 2005.
Howes’ story is of how morale in her California Blue Ribbon elementary school was destroyed by a bullying principal. Howes contends that the bullying was encouraged from the central administration office. The most moving story of the book is the suicide of a volunteer who was upset by the way the teachers were being treated.


The No Asshole Rule, Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t; Robert Sutton; Warner Business Books, New York; 2007.
A professor at Stanford University School of Business, Sutton contends that the best way to eliminate bullying adults is to not hire them in the first place and to weed them out if they slip through. Sutton argues that from an economic/business point of view, bullies are too much of a risk in terms of creating grounds for lawsuits, lost sales, good personnel driven away, etc.


White Chalk Crime, The REAL Reason Schools Fail; Karen Horwitz; Book Surge, Charleston, SC; 2008.
A somewhat strident book, Horwitz places the blame for the failure of America’s schools squarely at the feet of “Educrat$” who mismanage their most important resource in education-the dedicated classroom teacher. She places blame on adult bullies and administrators who care only for their own interests-not the students’ interest-for the failure of the schools.


When Teachers Talk, Principal Abuse of Teachers-The Untold Story; Rosalyn Schnall; Golden Ring, Las Vegas, NV; 2009.
Hundreds of stories of principals mistreating teachers. Most of the stories are firsthand; others are observed or second-hand stories. Stories are difficult to read because of the obvious pain suffered by the victim. Schnall estimates that 50% of teachers will be a target of bullying and that 90% of teachers will witness bullying of another teacher during their career.


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