The fact is that there are 130,930 K-12 public schools in the United States of America, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, with the average of 2,618 schools per state. For the 2022-20223 school year there is an average of 514 students per school.

Using the state of Massachusetts, my home state as an example, while we might doubt that there is an average of 514 students per school because we see so few children running around outside all the elementary schools we might drive by on any given day, it should be remembered that the high schools are huge compared to the Miss Marple Elementary on the corner. Brockton High has 4,046 students, Lawrence has 3,132, New Bedford has 2,722. That’s a lot of students and related families in those schools.

The amazing thing for me is that, ignoring the actual numbers, the conservative, anti-public school media choose to support their condemnations of teachers and public schools by finding parents with a complaint as if these few people they find represent all students and parents connected to the 130,930 schools

They don’t.

It’s like saying four out of five dentists recommend a certain toothpaste and then having one dentist pro and one con on a panel for discussion as if the representation were equal. To be honest in the discussion, it should be one dentist vs the other four, or one pro toothpaste dentists and only 1/5 of the other which limits discussion as part of a body really has little to contribute.

The division is not 50/50 and should not be represented as if both sides are supported by an equal number of people. This is not so.

A single complaining parent or a group of them only represents that individual or that group but not the opinions of the rest of the parents and should neither present themselves as a representative of all parents nor be interviewed as if they were.

In my 38-year teaching career I taught all grade levels, multiple subjects both in regular and special education classes, in a number of towns, cities, and states. A common occurrence that most teachers experienced during that time, and probably still do, was that on Back to School Teacher/Parent Night and the similar nights held throughout the year with each report card, parents of high achieving students would come to have their parent/education approach validated by being told how well their child was doing.

The parents you really needed to talk to would not show up. These, unfortunately, were those who, while avoiding any contact with the school or a teacher to discuss a problem or deal with a complaint were the first to run to someone with a microphone, their pastor, the news media, and now social media to air a complaint about something with which they do not approve, something that could have been more effectively handled if the parents attended meetings as scheduled or those called because of circumstances.

If you watch the reports on the news, the person being interviewed is presented as a true representative of all parents and students, but while the complaints are freely accepted, no one asks the complaining parents if they have met with the school, and by meet, I do not mean go to the classroom and yell at a teacher, but go to meet the teacher about a problem and agree on solutions that can be applied.

This does not get your name out there and your picture in the media, though, so it is not the preferred approach. Melodrama is.

Teachers have actually been accused by parents in the media of having done something on days they were absent because of illness, a personal day, or attendance at a conference.

Parents have complained about classes that actually do not exist.

Parents have complained that their children are having to learn more than they had been taught in school as if time froze with them.

A parent of one of my students brought a complaint to a local media news channel making all sorts of accusations about something in my classroom his daughter found objectionable to her religious beliefs After first airing a news report, the station sent a news team complete with the mobile telecast van, a cameraman, and a reporter to my apartment to see the horrible things that had been reported as a series of lewd pictures promoting homosexuality, only to leave disappointed to see that the parent, whose complaint they had made into a big news story as homosexuality was running rampant in my classroom, had actually misrepresented the facts and they had gone along with it. The follow up report that night to that of the evening before was basically to explain that there really had been no substance to the complaint, but they would keep the viewers informed if there were something to report.

There may have been a bit of a Keystone Kops aspect to the school’s administrators who, after the first report was aired in which the parent asserted he was coming to the school with members of his church to protest the Homosexualizing of the school and go to my room to remove all the Gay stuff, went to my classroom hours after the school was closed to remove all of the Gay stuff which, in reality, was just not there. Before  the mess was cleared up, local pastors in the town had decided as a group to preach one Sunday about the Gay situation at the high school which violated their religious beliefs, demand a cessation of that which did not exist, that the teacher of homosexuality be fired, and that the school allow kids to bring Bibles to school.

The clearing up involved just presenting the facts to these town criers with mild apologies coming from both the media and the pastors but left the public to believe I was a militant pedophile.

Apparently, the anticipated salacious details were so exciting that the media, so eager to report it, had failed to ask the complaining parent for actual details of that which had horrified his daughter, or questioned the veracity of the daughter’s complaint as her attendance was so sketchy that it was likely she really had not seen what was being complained about. As it turned out, she had, indeed, based her complaint on what she heard someone say without having seen what they were talking about. As far as  Gay books and stuff being allowed on campus while Bibles were not, this false claim was easily dispelled as, the day after my students had seen the report and knowing the complaining student had no credibility, my first class of the day took Bibles out of their backpacks in class to show me they all had one.

Had the parent contacted the principal and/or me, a lot could have been avoided without a false media story.

Regardless how many of her children a complaining parent mentions in an interview, there is no follow up as to the attendance, behavior, or achievement of the children, while also not looking into the home to see what the support for and involvement in the children’s education actually is.

If it sounds juicy, it is accepted without verification.

We have all seen parents at school committee meetings demanding certain topics be forbidden while others should be taught in school and have been taken aback a bit by the virulence. Teachers see the parents who often come to school to make a demand but not to discuss the rationale for or even the existence of a rational approach to a problem.

There is no room for rational discussion because their complaint must be honored in full or, as many parents do, threaten to go higher up and have the teacher fired. Often these are parents with the worst kids because there is no discipline at home, and who resent anyone who may have their child follow rules. These parents protect their princes and princesses until they become old enough to have minds of their own and do not follow whatever rules there might be at home.

In one experience, I and other teachers had a number of meetings with a parent when her child was in middle school where he had begun those grades as a cute kid. He became disruptive throughout the building convinced whatever he did had the approval of the other students who actually were becoming annoyed with him as the kid never looked to see if others were enjoying something but disrupted because of his lack of interest. The parental go-to defense was that he was not like this at home, where obviously the parents were present and there were not hundreds of others there to play off of or perform for, so, obviously, we were making things up because for some reason there was a universal dislike of her son among all the employees on campus from custodian to principal.

When I transferred to the high school where that student went after middle school, I was called to a meeting because I knew him from the middle school and the parent wanted advice on what to do with her now very tall and muscled son who refused to follow any direction she issued at home and had shown signs he was willing to defend this independence with violence. She was pleading for help to rein him in as he was disruptive at home and refused to follow any rules she had finally decided to lay down or directions from her about the simplest thing. I could only agree to do the best I could to help the kid, but having had these discussions for three years at the middle school only to be told the child was an angel and I a hater, her having allowed him to go undisciplined for 16 years and with her defending him from all teachers and rules for the 10 years of school to that point, there was really nothing I could do about the home situation which she promoted and defended until her son began taking advantage of his height and muscularity, having grown into an undisciplined adolescent that the parent now wanted to start disciplining.

She had finally met the son she had created while ignoring the warnings of how an undisciplined person will not do well in society. Having ignored teachers wanting to work collaboratively with the parent to help the kid in the self-control department, she was now demanding we do something to make it all right. However, like recognizing the rising water means the ship is sinking after having ignored multiple warnings and suggestions on how to save yourself, there comes a time you have to accept that the Titanic is doomed.

Not long after that meeting the son was arrested on a charge related to violence.

She had never attended a Parent/Teacher Night. 

I have had a parent object to my having my middle school students memorize the times tables up to 10 because he did not know his. I was forcing his son to learn something that the parent considered useless and, if I continued, he would bring his complaint to the school board. I agreed to not force his son to learn the times table knowing that as he realized everyone else in class knew them and had an easier time with math, the student would eventually decide on his own he needed to learn something the others knew.

He did.

Every teacher has stories of parents who only get involved in their child’s education to defend them against rules and the expectations of school and society on a regular basis with long lasting negative events.

They can also relate how a situation was dealt with in meetings where there were discussions and give and take that more often than not had the parent accepting realities of which they were not aware, such as a child acting differently in society outside of parental observation as compared to home where there were fewer people and a parental presence.

There are fewer of these stories than the other ones

Politicians are ignoring the real majority of parents, instead, paying attention to and pleasing an obscenely small but loud group of parents known mainly for their complaining in more areas than just schools, and do it for the cameras.

Education is complicated making it more involved as it broadens to meet society’s changes. What was useful during the Cold War gave way to what was needed in the Atomic Age, the Space Age, and the Computer Age, each requiring education to evolve.

It is a foolish betrayal of students and their futures if, as some demand, we return to just teaching readin’, ritin, and rithmatic. 

Each generation should be smarter than the previous ones, but it would seem that those who scream at school board meetings and demand their views and interests be the only views allowed, while attempting to limit education to the requirements of the past are advocating that it now go in the other direction.

With 130,930 K-12 public schools in the United States of America with the average of 2,618 schools per state and an average of 514 students per school, it is incumbent upon the politicians, media, and other parents to demand these loud people prove they speak for all, parents or even the majority and why their personal issues and their political and religious beliefs have control over the education of all students beyond their own kid or kids.

The majority of parents need to consider why it is required that teachers get degrees, have professional training, and get official certification while continuing their education in their fields only to be ignored when it comes to education in favor of the person who yells the loudest at a board meeting.

Is this who they want controlling their children’s future?

As it is, if the trend is allowed to continue, regardless what they may want for their own child, parents will have to accept that their child will only be taught as much as some other parent has decided their child will be taught and no more.

And the next generation, for the first time in history, will end up less educated than their parents.   

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Credentials:

Endorsed by TRUMP

Falsely claims the 2020 presidential race was rigged.

Opposed COVID-19 mandates

Fought against the extension of mail-in voting

Praises education in the state on his website, advocates bringing red state low achieving methods and laws to Massachuetts state

Said he supports the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

That burning smell in downtown Quincy is John Adams spinning in his grave.

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““This is, really, at its core, a storage argument that they’re making…. I don’t think a fight over storage of documents is worthy of what they’ve done, which is [a] full-scale raid and then these constant leaks.”

Marco Rubio 09/04/2022

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In the lead up to the 2020 elections, the prediction by President 45 was that the election would be rigged to explain a possible loss, while a win would obviously mean the election was legit. and prepare his supporters for whatever post-election actions he chose to take to make America great again and claim they were justified. He had local allies promoting this idea while attempting to prepare for the possible loss and aftermath.

Of course, there was the need to make a show of guarding against the predicted invented voter fraud and minions were needed for that. Among them the Sheriff of Bristol County Ma was at the front of the volunteer line.

As a cheerleader for Trump who claimed anything people found wrong with the performance of his sheriff duties was really just anti-Trump, and who volunteered county inmates to help build the wall on the Southern Border, reported to the While House that his parish church was following the teachings of Christ when it came to foreigners in your land, and begged to be and finally became the honorary chair of the Trump re-election committee in Massachusetts, he was motivated to either cause enough confusion to make the county elections as questionable as he needed them to be, or just make up unsupported claims that his deputies had observed irregularities. He could not do this if he had no control to any degree at the polls.

He claimed to be the champion of local law enforcement, a claim he bolstered by his unsupported claim that the people of the county don’t properly support them, while claiming his sheriff department’s presence at the polls was necessary because local law enforcement had not been doing their jobs in the past.

To prevent the obvious, the state legislature passed a bill making it painfully clear what a previous bill had established, that only local law enforcement are to be a presence at the polls and sheriffs and any other entity can only be present at the request of the locals in the event of a problem, like people invading the polls saying they were there to safeguard the unthreatened election and creating useful confusion from behind a badge.

The original 300-word Oath of Office for a sheriff in the state that was written around 1780 and included relevant points at the time of the Revolution had been reduced to a simple sentence over time.

“I, [name], do solemnly swear, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and will support the constitution thereof. So help me, God.”

The allegiance is to the Commonwealth, not a politician or an organization from outside the state whose constitution and sheriffs are not the same as Massachusetts.

When people were advocating for a more realistic approach to Covid in County jails, in spite of the other county sheriffs’ agreeing to follow the established and reasoned approaches, he stood alone in siding with Trump and condemning those in the state concerned about other citizens in an unsafe environment for trying to make him and Trump look bad.

He turned his back on the Commonwealth in favor of political gain and was actually willing to violate an existing law to have his way, causing the unnecessary rewrite of an already clear law.

In the 1970s Christian identity minister William Potter Gale began promoting the formation of citizens militias claiming, “that all healthy men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five who were not in the military could be mobilized into a posse comitatus to redress their grievances,”

People could either volunteer or would be drafted by their county sheriff, the “only legal law enforcement officer” in the country. This led to the formation of the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association which is an extremist group founded and headquartered in Arizona, home to Sheriff Hodgson’s idol, Joe Arpaio.  It wants to radicalize county sheriffs across America into believing they are the ultimate law enforcement authority, able to enforce, ignore, or break state and federal laws as they choose.

If they do not like a law, rather than suck it up and enforce it with even some of the vigor with which they enforce those laws they like, they choose to ignore certain laws especially as they have to be enforced on someone with whom the sheriff shares political and religious beliefs.

CSPOA claims that because county sheriffs are the only elected law enforcement officers, they are only accountable to their constituents and no higher government power. This ignores the fact that because of the requirements of living, most people, not having the time to run a state, choose representatives who stand in for the constituents and speak for them. We do not vote for one person so he can ignore all the others we voted for. If you ignore the chosen representatives, you ignore the constituents.

The group claims Constitutional Sheriffs are “upholding and defending the constitution,” as they see it, allowing them to make decisions usually made by the Supreme Court.

There are 6 main requirements to be a Constitutional Sheriff that deal with age, citizenship, being of sound mind and body, but no requirement to show an understanding of the U.S. Constitution or even to have read it.

It is the law enforcement version of the middle school law book that claims anything with which they do not agree is against the law according to a friend.

When the public, the constituents, began demanding stricter gun laws, Constitutional sheriffs and the CSPOA announced they would not enforce any laws passed in that regard.

Governor DeSantis of Florida fired an elected District Attorney for saying that about Abortion laws but allows Constitutional Sheriffs to continue to pick and choose the laws they will enforce in actuality without fear of dismissal.

This organization has spawned its own child, Protect America Now, with Sheriff Tom Hodgson of Bristol County, Massachusetts, as an adviser to the group having joined it in 2014. This group in turn is connected to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant group to which the Bristol County spewer of anti-immigrant stereotypes, tropes, and images of dark alley predators belongs.

The other members and advisors of these groups are from Western states where the job of sheriff is not that of a Massachusetts sheriff whose job is custodial not law enforcement and posses on horseback.

Don Knotts wants so desperately to be John Wayne.

Protect America Now subscribes to the desperate claims about electoral fraud in the 2020 election, a claim that locally could have been supported by the confusion at the Bristol County polls that, thankfully, the head of Trump’s re-election committee was unable to cause and then somewhat mitigate even as he was causing it, for appearances sake. PAN held a conference this past summer for “all Americans and law enforcement nationwide to come together in pursuit of the truth regarding the 2020 election.”

Protect America Now wants to build a base to intervene in future elections over “fraud” claims with the sheriff being a major part of that process.

Taking their cue from Trump, and his having been a member of PAN since 2014, it is not that hard to connect the dots and see why of all years with no prior urgency,  it was imperative in 2020 for Tom Hodgson to have some control of the county polls.

On its website, that also has a picture of the sheriff with a padded resume, the group states,

“We support Sheriffs and law enforcement members that believe in God, Family and Freedom. They serve the people and they stand ready to protect our citizens.”

But their actions speak of all this rather selectively as the people they serve and protect may not believe in whatever God they do or agree with laws with which the sheriffs don’t, and its advisor, Thomas Hodgson, has denigrated local law enforcement in the attempt to control the polls in 2020, so support of local law enforcement isn’t cast in stone.

This may be to some a very broad brush, but as you listen to, watch, or read about the January Sixth investigation of the attempted insurrection, Hodgson’s many groups are affiliated in some way with the groups mentioned in that event. They share advisors, board members, inter-group membership, and attend and speak at the same gatherings.

The Constitution protects the right to feely assemble and join whatever groups we choose. The sheriff has that right.

But considering he is on the side of the insurrectionists, perhaps the taxpayers of the county should not be footing the bill for his many excursions to gatherings whose goal is to make this state, the cradle of liberty and home of some of democracy’s greats, into a red state where sheriffs don’t look so dorky when donning a cowboy hat.

I am sure his Constitutional Sheriff partners would love to have him in Arizona with them in more friendly territory, and as it would no longer cost the taxpayers of the county for his visits to meet with them, voting for his opponent in the coming election would make this mutually beneficial arrangement a reality.

As for his attempting to turn Massachusetts into a red state or at least Bristol County, I have lived in other places with other types of sheriffs and other types of political and religious beliefs that are not those of Massachusetts.

I have been there. We do not want that here.

Set Thomas Hodgson free to pursue his Western, red state dreams where they are relevant.

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It was 1975 and I was about to hit my 25^th birthday. There was a gathering of friends later that day, but in the meantime, there was an odd event that occurred.

I was teaching American Literature at a Catholic college prep high school. As we began covering Melville and Moby Dick, both the book and movie Jaws were released. Some of my students who had seen the movie noticed some similarities between both stories.

These students, wanting the extra credit as it would bring up their grades, asked if they could do a report comparing the two books after they noticed the three days of the final hunt, the sinking of the boat and ship both named after the same tribe in Connecticut, both beasts were great and white, along with a few more details that gave them the impression the new book was an updating of the old.

The end result was a group report which listed and cited the similarities with their conclusion that they could see why a book considered boring now (who hunts whales?) was popular then because one about a current interest, sharks, was popular now, and both were made into successful movies.

I showed their report to the principal, a man of literature, who appreciated the students’ effort and work.

Behind the school at the crest of the hill was the provincial house of the order than ran the school. This is where the regional leader of the order, the Provincial, lived, where the major administrative offices were, and where those who worked in them lived. It also housed some elder members of the order who had at one time been important, but now were old and given an honored space there as opposed languishing in some obscure setting.

The people in that building, other than the province’s director of education, really had no direct say in the daily running of the school, so regardless of opinions, other than promoting the transferring of someone with whom they had educational differences, their opinions had no influence, although there were some who tried.

I was called to the office at the end of the eve of my birthday as the principal had received an official complaint from someone in the Provincial House.

An old priest was requesting my dismissal. He had heard of the student generated and competed report after the principal had mentioned it in a casual conversation when having dinner at the provincial house one evening, and, having seen the movie, objected because he was offended by some of the language, and the principal was informing me he had been called to a meeting scheduled the next day to explain this and to be directed to fire me post-haste.

My presence was not needed, so I would just have to wait until after the meeting to find what others discussed without any input or defense from me.

At the meeting, according to those in attendance, the old priest took out a copy of the book, Jaws, in which he had highlighted every curse word he had come across with a red pen and demanded to know why a teacher would have been allowed to assign such a book and related report.

The principal for his part when the time came, simply read the report aloud and followed up with pointing out what the students had found on their own in a book the teacher had not assigned but, because of the similarities they had seen in the movie, had asked if they could read both books and compare.

In contrast, without having actually read the book, this priest had only gone through it underlining curse words, so the question was which of us, the teacher whose students had been motivated to do a report that called for reading two books, or a priest who did not read the book but quietly and alone had gone through a book looking for dirty words, was unacceptable.

When asked about plot points not included in the movie, the old priest could not recite any as his only plot knowledge was from the movie.

The contrast was clear, and the matter ended.

Without this meeting, the probability that I would have been fired was strong.

Had the complaint not been investigated and the complainant’s warped approach not exposed, a teacher who motivated some students to want to do extra work to learn more would have been lost.

Someone who has not read a book should not have their complaint honored until such time as they have read the book and can cite the offensive parts accepting that their interpretation or discomfort is not universal.

At the beginning of the 21^st Century and as part of the evangelical attempt to purge books they did not like from public libraries with an emphasis on those that were “homosexually themed”, there was a movement by an Oklahoma state legislator to make this happen going so far as to threaten state funds if libraries did not cooperate.

To counter this and to fill in the gap in the city’s school district when it came to positive books about Gay people, the Gay Community in OKC presented two books, one on the Stonewall Rebellion and the other the bio of Bayard Rustin, to the district to be placed in the high school libraries. These were carefully chosen as they were historical people and events and were not novels containing any sexual scenarios. If sex were mentioned, it was only because such a reference was an important, passing detail with no more to it than mentioning an event happened on a Wednesday.

There was a long delay before the books appeared on the high school library shelves. I kept pestering the director of school libraries and she finally let me know she had lent copies of both books to selected people in the school dept and outside to read so they would not only know the actual contents of the book but could be prepared to counter any uninformed complaint. She wanted the books in the libraries but knew with the state representative there could be problems. She knew there would be objections most likely from those who did not read the book, making wild statements about the unread content.

There was a meeting I was asked to attend when those who had read the books met to discuss them. Nothing objectionable was found although there were questions that were more for clarification of terms that were mainly dated Gay jargon.

The books all went to the high schools after this on the same day and all were put on the shelves. To my knowledge there have been no complaints and if there were now, one would have to admit that those two books have been on the shelves for at least 18 years with no disruptive influence,

Both these instances illustrate to me, anyway, that those who object to a book must first prove they have read it and must be able to answer questions on the book itself before their complaint is taken under consideration.

Groups who protest a book in their organization’s name must first prove those protesting. whether in writing or in person, whether an individual or a gathering of people, have read the book they condemn and cite the actual passages they find objectionable

It is a minimal requirement for such a major step.

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