It's the heartwarming finale that you've seen on movies and TV: everybody rallies in a great show of support to show that they trust and support the person who has been set upon by the cold-hearted system. In real life this is how it is done as well. UTLA has a confidentiality clause. When you are being persecuted you are not to speak about it to anyone. Or your case may be thrown out. The District may continue to interview anyone it wants at anytime it wants. The defendant is not to gather witnesses or statements or support from colleagues in any way. UTLA has joined forces with LAUSD to make every aspect of an attack upon a teacher's words and works as quiet as possible. Someone says something disparaging about a teacher and they are meekly and quietly not to raise a stink. Take whatever punishment LAUSD/UTLA decides to dish out and slink quietly away. This is an undemocratic, unconstitutional abomination. Knowing that the union will do nothing to support you I advise you to tell everyone immediately what is going on or there will be no heartwarming finale.

Spineless Contract

You should realize that our contract is not worth the paper it is printed on, or perhaps to be more contemporary, not worth the bandwidth it inhabits.

After months of harassment I was thrilled when my principal so blatantly violated the contract.

11.0 d. When imposing discipline or when giving reprimands, warnings or criticism, confidentiality and privacy appropriate to the professional relationship shall be maintained.

He walked into my classroom, during class and criticized me.So there it was. According to the contract he was in violation. By filing a grievance that the principal had to lose, it should enable me to end the ridiculous harassment from the management.

Here is the timeline. In September I notified the principal that one of my students had been using racial epithets, sexual comments, physical sexual assault (rubbing his body against that of others) inappropriate sexual behavior (crawling under desks of girls wearing skirts) sexual harassment (leering and grabbing himself), threatening that if anyone told that he knew big kids who would beat them up, pushing, tripping, hitting, choking and stabbing (with a pencil).He had assaulted and battered most of the students in my class. I thought that the student should be removed from my class.

The principal had a different take. He accused me of being out to get this student, and told me to not harass him in the future.Everything I said was substantiated and the student's behavior got worse and infected the behavior of others as well.

You may think that I am exaggerating but I am not. Here is what I consider a short definitive example, of the nonsensical harassment that I received. There was a boy in my class who had been suspended from school on a number of occasions for various reasons. One day I sent him out on referral, because he peed in the classroom.He asked to use the restroom and there was no reason I should have let him. He jumped up and down and said he had to go. This might have been more convincing if another boy had not just done the same thing, and if it wasn't just after break, and he had been tardy anyway, and he hadn't done his homework etc.So I told him he was not entitled to use the restroom pass, he announced he was going to pee in the trash can, and then proceeded to do so.
The referral I wrote said he peed in the classroom.
The response I got was, "He said he didn't do it, do you have any proof?"

It is hilarious and absurd but most of all a sign of incompetent,vindictive management. Their antipathy towards me, affected my students and by extension all of the students at the school.

To continue with the timeline: I filed my grievance against the principal in June. A week after he received the notice of grievance from union he filed the first of his unsats against me.

The reason for the unsat : Lack of self control when dealing with students.
That is the whole of it. It was based upon the incident that proceeded the principal's contract violation. The child of whom I spoke previously , who had assaulted the majority of the class, and been calling me names from the back of the room during silent reading time . He refused to stop so I wrote a referral. Or I should say I tried to write. While I tried to write the referral he began to come towards me. I told him to stay where he was and not to approach me.Literally that is what I said. When he continued to approach me I repeated what I said exactly, only louder.When he continued to approach me I repeated it a third time even louder.
This really shouldn't have been a problem except in an empty classroom across the walk way was a meeting of some other administrators from another school, and apparently the principal thought this made him look badly.

So he came in my room and yelled at me, I filed a grievance that day, and then he files an unsat against me , two weeks later.

I claimed this was retaliation.UTLA said prove it.Six months later I was given twenty minutes to tell twelve people why I should not receive unsats from this principal. They said they would not support my grievance. I asked why not? I was told I was not entitled to that information. I e-mailed the union and was given a bit of a run around.

The head of the union contacted of the local rep and he responded by sending me the principal's half-assed apology letter that he was required to write to me because he violated the contract. The letter was written back in July but the local rep didn't send me a copy (why wasn't it mailed direct?) until I began to complain and was apparently pressured by the head of the union to do his job.He didn't forward the apology letter until six months after he received it.

Because the union would not stand up for me I received 3 days of suspension with no pay. Mind you I had not broken any contract.
The principal wrote a letter, far shorter than the conference memos he kept writing but just as creative.

Punch and Judy

Punch hits Judy, and Judy hits Punch, but in the end they are both puppets on the same puppeteers hands. Lausd and Utla are both bureaucracies far removed from the sphere of teaching. Similar to Politicians, the bureaucrats seem to be more concerned with keeping their positions than doing their jobs. It's almost like a law of Physics. Actually it is a law of physics.
They would have us believe it's us vs. them. Let's take to the streets and shout and wave our signs. But they are us. The administrators were all once teachers, as were most of the high ranking officials on both sides. Does a teacher cross a line and change their thinking? This is all nonsense. The truth is most bureaucrats are incompetent. A CEO can lose their company a billion dollars and still receive millions in bonuses. The last thing anyone needs is intelligent, competent, thoughtful people who are clearly more qualified than ourselves. Why they would put us all out of our jobs. (And make the world a better place). Well, we can't have that. Let's ensure that the schools fail. Look at the system and see if it isn't designed for failure.

Face the facts

I work in L.A. as a teacher, but I could be working anywhere in the U.S. I'm tired of the lies and deceptions presented by various people and groups about teaching.Herein, like nowhere else shall the truth be told.