McClendon Studios Presents:
From The Janitor to The Governor
Disclaimer: Many of the stories are completely fictional. Other stories are fictional accounts of true stories. Other stories are completely true. Sometimes the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
We had problems with the local school district for years. When my
brother was in the ninth grade, he took an algebra test. The teacher gave back his test with all the answers marked as being wrong. My mother looked over the test and saw that all the answers were right. She got several other people to check behind her and, in fact, all the answers were right.
The next day, she went to the school to see the principal and the teacher. They both agreed that all the answers were right. The solution they came up with was for my brother to copy his answers over on to a new test paper and the teacher would mark the answers right.
My brother started private school shortly after that.
My child-bride Suzanne was in the same district. While she was waiting at the local middle school for the proper bus to arrive, she realized she needed to use the restroom. She started into the school and one of the teachers, who was also a bus supervisor, put his hands on her to restrain her from going to the restroom. She removed his hands from her body and she was suspended.
In one of Suzanne’s classes, one of her male teachers decided it would be funny to pull his chair up beside hers and start making kissy faces at her while the class laughed.
Fast forward a few years. We had the foster children living with us. The school district had moved the bus stop where our kids caught the bus from the road one street over to a stop on a main road that was on a blind hill. The stop was blind in all directions. We protested; the State of South Carolina did nothing.
Suzanne started driving the younger ones to school. Each day when she picked them up, one of the teachers, a female, found it necessary to touch each one of the girls. She would cross the parking lot to make sure she touched each one of the girls every single day.
If one of the girls got by her without getting touched, she would call them back to her so she could touch them. Suzanne told her on several occasions not to put her hands on them.
It rose to such a level that we spoke with the school officials and they supposedly made arrangements for the girls to be released from class five minutes early so that they could walk to the doors on the other side of the school before the older kids were dismissed.
In theory, this would keep them from being trampled by the older kids. The teachers never let the young girls go on time, so they had to fight their way through the older, larger kids.
Suzanne decided to pick them up in the same lot she had been picking them up in because she did not want them to be trampled by the older, larger kids.
The teacher went back to touching the girls. Suzanne told her to keep her hands off the girls.
The next day when Suzanne was dropping off the girls, she was met by the assistant principal who informed Suzanne she was to report to the principal’s office. Suzanne parked the car and entered the school.
The janitor had just waxed the floor and Suzanne slipped and fell. When she finally got back up, she went in to the principal’s office and told him she had fallen on school property.
The principal ignored what Suzanne said and immediately jumped on Suzanne. He told her that she was to say nothing more to that teacher and that they were encouraging that teacher to file charges against Suzanne for harassing her on the job.
This tells you how smart that principal was. There was no law in South Carolina at that time regarding this.
Suzanne had had enough. She had put up with nearly 30 years of harassment from that school district. She let the principal know that she had male teachers paw on her, make fun of her, and harass her. She let them know of all the students the school district had allowed to harass her, and that some of these male students who had physically attacked her were now “upstanding members” of the school board.
Suzanne told of all the injustices she was expected to endure through all her school years, and that her brothers were forced to endure for all their years there. Then she left.
She came home and told me about it. I called the principal. Before he got on the phone good, he had apologized for not listening to Suzanne when she told him she had fallen.
I informed him that we had enough, that if this school district were to step out of line one more time, we would sue everyone from the janitor up to the governor.
We had been investigating homeschooling at the time. We had looked in
to it for several years, in fact. In South Carolina at that time, one had to either join an oversight group or get the permission of the school board to homeschool.
We submitted our request to homeschool to the school district and then we joined Homeschool Legal Defense. We also joined an oversight group, just in case.
Our application to homeschool was put on the agenda for the next school board meeting. We did not go, but we were told that before the reading of the application was complete, there was a motion and a second and it moved to a unanimous vote with no discussion.
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