My 7-year-old and I play a little game on the ride home from school each day called “High Low.”
After we clear the madness that is the school’s parking lot we take turns telling each other one high point and one low point of our respective days.
A couple of weeks before Christmas my daughter shared a “high” of crafting Christmas cards for her teacher’s 20-something-year-old unmarried daughter who couldn’t make it home to Wisconsin for the holidays. I didn’t get all the details, but I from what I gathered, the teacher’s daughter had to remain in Texas for some job-related function and therefore wouldn’t be able to spend Christmas with her parents and siblings.
In any event, the entire class drew, colored and wrote cards to their teacher’s daughter so she wouldn’t be lonely on Christmas.
At first, I thought it was a little strange that these second graders were designing handmade cards for a person they had never met before, but, you know, spreading Christmas joy, bringing holiday cheer to those who can’t be with loved ones, working on penmanship, yada, yada, fa, la, la, la, la, la, and all that good stuff.
Basically, I didn’t give it much thought after that until yesterday.
That’s when I read an article in the New York Daily News about a teacher who also had her entire class make holiday cards for someone who wouldn’t be able to spend the holidays with loved ones.
Only, the person receiving the cards wasn’t the teacher’s son. It was her boyfriend.
Her incarcerated boyfriend, who according to reports, has a passion for child porn and is doing time in the clink for gun possession.
The paper reports that Melissa Dean, a teacher at Public School 143 in Queens, New York, forced her elementary students to draw cards for her jailbird beau in December because she “thought it was a nice thing to do.”
However, according to the paper, Dean did not get permission from school administrator or the students’ parents to send the cards — some of which contained the children’s names and home addresses.
“If you write something nice to them, they will write back to us,” Dean, told the class, according to investigators interviewed by the newspaper.
But, the only person who ended up contacting anyone was a prison guard who intercepted all 27 of the cards and alerted Dean’s principal, who then notified parents.
Those parents are justifiably irate and are calling for Dean’s termination. So are school district supervisors. However, until a full investigation into the incident is complete, Dean remains employed (though she has been put on “desk duty”) and is still collecting her yearly salary of $75,283.
And here I thought educators were underpaid.
Apparently, ones like Dean are just under the influence of idiocy.
Makes you wonder what’s really going on in our children’s classrooms these days.
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