Monthly Archives: January 2007

Different Trouble at School

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Snowletter
Back on October 30, 2006 a teacher and the principal at Lewisville Elementary were suspended with pay while they were investigated.  I originally posted about it here and I’ve updated the post several times since then.  At the beginning of the new year the principal, Mr. Rash, was reinstated with his pocket a little lighter (10 days of his suspension was unpaid) and today (January 17, 2007) the teacher, Mr. Snow was reinstated in full.  I should point out that Mr. Rash was suspended because of how he originally handled the allegations against Mr. Snow, thus the unpaid part of his suspension, and Mr. Snow was suspended due to the allegations for which he has now been cleared.

The image above is a scan of the letter that the school system sent home with the students today (click on it to enlarge) and this followed a late automated call from the school superintendent last night.  That call was made because the father of the child who made the accusations showed up at the Board of Education last night and during the public part of the meeting complained that Mr. Snow was going to be reinstated. From the article about it in the Winston-Salem Journal:

An angry parent
confronted members of the Forsyth County school board in a meeting last night after he learned that school officials planned to return a
teacher who was investigated by the sheriff’s office to the classroom
this week.

"What concerns me
greatly is I learned of this decision via the grapevine," said the parent, whose child is a student at Lewisville Elementary School and
one of the children involved in the misconduct allegations against the
science teacher, Alan Snow. The Winston-Salem Journal is not
identifying the parent in order protect the identity of the child.

The parent said he
is concerned that he might not have enough time to prepare his family for the teacher’s return if it happened as quickly as school-system
officials told him that it could.

Superintendent Don
Martin and school-board chairman Donny Lambeth interrupted the father
a few minutes after he began speaking during the meeting.

Martin also
approached the father in the auditorium after the meeting ended and chastised him for talking about the case during an open session,
telling him that doing so could create more publicity before parents
could be advised about the teacher’s status.

The parents of the
child involved in the case met privately with the school system’s attorneys and other officials after the public meeting.

Martin updated the
school board on the case during a closed session last night, but he said later that no decision has been made about whether Snow can return
to teaching.

In his letter to the parents Superintendent Martin expressed regret that the investigation by the Sheriff’s and District Attorney’s offices took so long and that he appreciated the parents’ and Mr. Snow’s patience in the matter.  I’d say the least they should be is appreciative.  The man lived through the holidays with this hanging over his head and he’s been in limbo for close to 90 days and that’s simply unacceptable to me.

In a comment posted a couple of days ago on my original post a person going by the moniker P. Smith made some interesting comparisons between Mr. Snow’s case and the Duke Lacrosse case.  In the first paragraph of that comment he/she wrote the following:

Some interesting comparisons to what happened at Duke and the case in
Lewisville–an allegation from an unreliable witness–in this case a
teacher with a vendetta against another teacher. Sounds like the
science teacher is coming back to Lewisville after a thorough
investigation which found no wrong doing on him. Now, the question is:
what happens to someone who makes up a story to "get back at another
person"?

Until now I’ve only heard about a student making an allegation against Mr. Snow, but P. Smith seemed to know about Mr. Snow being cleared at least a day before it became a news item which leads me to believe he/she is tapped into the "grapevine" that the student’s dad referred to in the Journal article, and so I’m wondering which teacher the grapevine is saying had it out for Mr. Snow.

Now comes the truly hard part for the school.  Mr. Snow is an incredibly popular teacher with many students and parents and I have a feeling that there are going to be some festering wounds left by this experience.  I can only imagine what Mr. Snow is feeling these days, and he will be a larger man than most of us if he is able to return to school and not harbor some serious animosity towards those who were ready to believe the worst. (Speaking of which, to this date no one has said what Mr. Snow was accused of, so everyone was left to imagine the worst).  And I’m sure that there will be many members of the Lewisville community wondering what the consequences should be for those who filed the allegations against Mr. Snow.  There will also be those wondering if Mr. Snow has grounds for a civil case against his accuser’s family and there may even be those who will push him to sue.  Finally, I’m sure there are plenty of people who know who made the accusations and I’m willing they won’t be too shy about sharing that knowledge.  All of this can spell serious trouble for the school’s community, and I guess the best we can hope for at this point is that we keep the kids out of the fray as much as possible.  That’s something about which I’m sure everyone can agree.

As for the school system I think they have to seriously re-think some of their policies.  When I talked to the Assistant Superintendent for Lewisville, a very nice lady named Charlene Davis, she emphasized to me that if they are going to err it is going to be on the side of protecting the children.  I’m all for that, but I think they can do so without killing a teacher’s career.  For instance, I see no reason to make the teacher’s name public until there’s sufficient evidence or reason to do so.  Sure we the parents will probably know what’s going on, but in the Google Age the accusations will live long and spread far whether they’re founded or not.  Let’s put it this way; if Mr. Snow decides to leave town and start fresh somewhere else he’ll probably be checked out by all potential employers and if they type his name into a search engine what do you think will pop up?  What are the chances they’ll see the article about the allegations and then stop looking before they get to the articles about his being cleared?

What I mentioned to Ms. Davis is that they could have protected the kids by removing Mr. Snow from the classroom and they could have protected Mr. Snow by saying that he was on a temporary assignment with the school system, or that he was taking a leave of absence.  Whatever, as long as they don’t make public that a teacher is being investigated until they have solid evidence that something’s going on then I think they’ll be doing a lot better.

Another issue they need to work on is communication.  They definitely did a better job once enough parents complained about not knowing what was going on, but they need to have a communication process already planned out for instances like this.  By not communicating effectively they let the grapevine or rumor mill do the communicating for them and that helps no one.

**Update 1/22/07** In the Sunday, January 21, 2007 Winston-Salem Journal columnist Scott Sexton had the following in his piece:

The man wanted to know
whether school officials were about to put a teacher who had been
investigated on sexual-abuse allegations involving his son back into
the classroom Thursday morning. If so, he wanted to know why he and his
wife had not been told about it.

and

Dealing with sex-abuse
allegations is difficult for all parties. The parents ride an emotional
roller coaster, and the teacher, whose livelihood and reputation are at
stake, goes through hell, too. Investigators have to tread lightly when
interviewing a child, and school officials must work hard to balance
the serious nature of the accusations with the rights of their employee.

As far as I know this is the first time that the specific allegations against Mr. Snow have been made public and I’ve emailed Mr. Sexton to see if he’ll share where he heard those specific allegations.  Was it at the board meeting (did the father blurt it out during the public session) or did he get it in private from the family or from a school official?  And no matter the source, why specify the charges now that Mr. Snow has been cleared and after everyone (including his own paper) had been so careful to avoid publicly airing the specific allegations?

To sum up I can only say that I hope that Mr. Snow can find peace back at school, the Lewisville community can somehow patch the wounds of this event and the school system can learn from its mistakes before more careers are jeopardized.  As for the child and his family, I don’t know them (don’t want to know who they are) and I only hope that they somehow find whatever help they need. 

I Swear

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Here in North Carolina an appeals court just ruled that a Muslim woman can proceed with a lawsuit claiming that she should be allowed to swear to tell the truth on the Quran instead of the Bible.  As you can imagine this is causing some consternation among the locals, and it’s making for some nice debate.  Over at the Greensboro News & Record Doug Clark makes this point:

This is an important case about an old tradition, or ritual, in our
courts. I think there is continued value in asking witnesses to swear
their truthfulness upon a sacred text (or affirming their oath if they
prefer). But the practice is meaningful only if the text is held as
sacred by the persom making the promise. If that’s a Quran, or the
Hebrew Bible, or some other holy text, then so be it. Our law should
not bestow authority exclusively on one above the others.

I have to say that I agree with Doug’s point.  I mean how logical is it to ask someone to swear the truth on something they don’t believe in?  Doesn’t it give them license to lie?

In my role on the Lewisville Zoning Board of Adjustment I get to hear "cases" along with the other board members.  In our training we were told that we function pretty much like judges in a court of law; our job isn’t to offer an opinion on how properties should be zoned but rather to interpret whether or not the zoning laws are being met.  Whenever we hear a case we have witnesses who either support or oppose the proposed project and we have to swear those witnesses in.  Most do swear on the Bible but in one case we had a lady who said that it went against her Christian beliefs to swear on the Bible so she was able to simply affirm that she would tell the truth.  Her position was a new one to me and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I came across a comment from Cara Michele on Ed Cone’s blog about the Quran case.  Here’s what she wrote:

"Again, you have heard that it
was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the
oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all:
either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is
his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.
And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white
or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything
beyond this comes from the evil one."  — words of Jesus in Matt. 5:33-37

If the Bible is your sacred text, then you’re not going to swear on it.  (That’s assuming that you’ve read it.  And if you haven’t read your sacred text, well… what are you waiting for!) 

And if the Bible isn’t your sacred text, then swearing on it is basically meaningless anyway, right?

Irony.

Interesting, huh?  Personally I’d be fine with moving to a non-sectarian affirmation of truth across the board.  Perjury is perjury whether you swear on the Bible or on a stack of X-Men comic books, so why not make everyone’s lives simpler by simply requiring witnesses to say "I promise to tell the truth"?

On a lighter note, this reminds me of a moment we had last year when we (the ZBOA) couldn’t find the Bible and we ended up using the town attorney’s PDA Bible memory card for the swearing in. I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an act of faith for us to believe that the memory card was in fact a Bible, but in the end it didn’t matter as long as the people involved believed it was a Bible. And of course if we hadn’t found the Bible we could have proceeded with everyone affirming that they would tell the truth.  Kind of makes me wonder what the big deal is here.

 

Forecast Gloomy

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I was enjoying my cup of coffee this morning while catching up with email and favorite blog posts and my mood was positively sunny.  Then I came across this post on David Boyd’s blog and followed his instructions to view the Nuclear Jihad videos on the NY Times website.   Well, there went my good mood.  Here’s what David had to say about the videos:

The only thing more shocking than how extensive and user-friendly the
AQ Kahn network was, is how surprised our intelligence and government
officials were at how extensive and user-friendly the AQ Kahn network
was.

If we were this clueless about what was happening, even after our
senses were heightened following 9/11, then we’re just waiting. This
thing is Hurricane Katrina + 9/11 * 1000. We know it’s coming. We don’t
know where and when and what we’re going to do about it.

This economy and lifestyle we have in the US and the West in general is
a powerful thing. More people are living well in the West than have
lived well in the history of the world. This is the pinnacle of human
achievement and one wonders what can happen to derail it. This is it.
Once the bomb goes off, we’ll look back at this period of innocence and
naivete with longing. Enjoy it while it’s happening.

Remember when the 9/11 report came out and everyone was saying that our intelligence breakdown was in part a failure of imagination?  Well, how hard is it to imagine that at some point in the future we’ll be looking back at our current naivete with longing?  Think about how we look back at pre-9/11/01 now and then multiply by a factor of 10 and I think we have an idea about how right David probably is.

There went my good mood.

Stupid Lawyers. Oxymoron?

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I recently stumbled upon a cool new web service called Stumble Upon (hat tip to Sean Coon for pointing it out) which is a little browser tool you can download and use for free. Here’s how it’s described by BBCWorld:

"Stumbleupon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and
gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been
stumbled upon by other web-users"

So I was using my little new procrastinating tool and I found this page of funny quotes from courtroom transcripts.  Here’s a small sample, but then you really should check out the whole thing:

Lawyer:  "How far apart were the vehicles at the time of the
collision?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you alone or by yourself?"

and,

Lawyer:  "I show you Exhibit 3 and ask you if you recognize
that picture."

Witness:  "That’s me."

Lawyer:  "Were you present when that picture was taken?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Doctor, did you say he was shot in the woods?"

Witness:  "No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region."

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you acquainted with the deceased?"

Witness:  "Yes sir."

Lawyer:  "Before or after he died?"

and,

 

Lawyer:  "What is your relationship with the plaintiff?"

Witness:  "She is my daughter."

Lawyer:  "Was she your daughter on February 13, 1979?"
   

 

and finally,

Lawyer:  "Now, doctor, isn’t it true that when a person
dies in his sleep, in most cases he just passes quietly away and
doesn’t know anything about it until the next morning?"

Are We Living in the New Appalachia?

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Dana Blankenhorn has written an interesting piece called "The New Appalachia" in which he argues that the abject poverty we used to associate with Appalachia has shifted to the areas between the mountains and the coast.  From his post:

Appalachia had resisted all attempts to bring it prosperity. Places
last western Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western
North Carolina were as poor as they had ever been. There seemed to be
no solution.

But there was a solution, right around the corner. These are now
"the mountains," that fabled far-away magical land where lowlanders
dream of retiring to. This is now the east’s vacationland, an
alternative to the beach, where rafting and hiking and mountain biking
rule the summers, and skiing the winters. The resort and retirement
economies have transformed these areas into, if not greater prosperity
spheres, at least something resembling the rest of America.

But a new Appalachia has developed in our time. It’s the river
bottoms, the swamplands, the vast middle between the mountains and the
seacoast. Millions of people live there, in grinding lives of poverty
or of faded wealth. And it’s getting worse.

The farm economy that once sustained these areas has collapsed. The
factories that once dotted the landscape have moved overseas. Much of
the land now consists of tree farms, and the people who are left are
steadily losing ground.

The biggest difference between today’s Appalachia and yesterday’s is
more stark, however. It’s the color of the victims. (That’s the point of the chart at left, from the Knight Foundation.)  Because in the
South, the new Appalachia is often the "black belt," land share-cropped
for some generations, then lost to the trees.

This hit home because Winston-Salem and the Piedmont Triad are situated to the east of the mountains and have been hit hard by the meltdown of the furniture and textile industries.  My first inclination was to disagree with Dana’s assertion that this is a disproportionately black phenomenon since at least in this area the hit has been taken be people of all colors, but if you think of it in comparison to Appalachia, which was predominately white, then I guess it makes sense.

The good news here is that the local leadership has been very proactive in trying to convert the local economy from a manufacturing base to a more "intellectual" base of biotechnology and design services.  The success has been mixed but it looks promising for the future.  To me the question that remains is "Will the jobs be filled by re-trained locals or by outsiders who follow the jobs here?".

And Dana’s bigger point about the lowlands is a good one.  While the Piedmont seems to be on the upswing all you have to do is drive to the beach through literally hundreds of dying or dead small towns to realize that your seeing an economic wasteland of immense proportions.

Finally, let’s not forget that the evolution of Appalachia to the "fabled far-away magical land" has not come without some negative effects within the mountain communities.  For instance in this article in the Raleigh News & Observer we see that while local leaders in the western North Carolina mountains welcome the influx of tax dollars and service jobs that come with the development of luxury second-home communities local residents worry about how their going to pay the taxes on their suddenly soaring property valuations.  And of course some people aren’t going to be happy with the influx of carpetbaggers no matter how many jobs it creates.

For the most part, though, I agree with Dana’s post.

Where I’d Like to Position the Missionaries

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Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

  • Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
  • Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
  • Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."

Cool NC State Parks Site

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Of the "web 2.0" developments I think that the coolest is the explosion of "mashups" that resulted from companies like Google opening up their API (whatever that is) and letting any Joe Citizen develop a widget or service incorporating its service.  A great example is this mashup of data on North Carolina state parks and Google Maps.  If you click on any of the bubbles it will pop up a window with a weather forecast from Yahoo, a link to pictures tagged with the name of the park on Flickr , and a link to the park’s own website.  Simple, but effective.

Orni…,uh, Ornithol…, Aw Heck, Just Call it Birdshit

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One of my lasting memories of childhood is my mother freaking out around birds.  Any birds, big or small, caused her to melt into a stuttering, jittery mess if they got within arms length of her.  Her condition resulted from a childhood run-in she had with a rabid chicken on some family member’s farm (I think that’s the story) and she’d never been able stand them after that.

When I was in college I was living in an apartment with a couple of guys, including my longtime roommate Fig (cool story: Fig moved to Winston-Salem two years before I did and we now see him and his family more than we ever used to in DC).  He worked at a pet store and then at the Fairfax County Animal Shelter and would often bring home the animals that were considered hopelessly ill and try to nurse them back to health.  One of those animals was a large, white thing that I think was a cockatoo. Whatever it was it had a condition that caused it to lose its feathers over time, resulting in a constantly decaying state of plumage and an attitude more surly than a 13 year old girl deprived of a cell phone (I know where of I speak).  It lived on a pedestal placed on our only table which was located at the central most point in our apartment. That meant you couldn’t go anywhere in the apartment without the thing hissing or trying to fling poop at you.  Thankfully it couldn’t go anywhere due to its bald state and you were safe if you stayed about a foot outside the perimeter of the table.

Needless to say once the bird from hell moved in Mom stopped visiting, but not until she’d stopped by before I could warn her about our new roommate.  She walked in, was hissed at, let out a kind of cry/whelp, blanched whiter than our bald bird, turned around and didn’t come back until it moved out. Note: "moved out" is a euphemism for "croaked".

All this is a long preface to the true topic of this post which is the amazing change Mom made a couple of years ago when she met her leading man, the estimable Dr. Bert Dickas, retired professor of geology and avid bird watcher.  In the years since they met she’s joined him on numerous birding expeditions and can now tell a pigeon from an emu.  She’s gone so far as to fly to a Caribbean destination with the express purpose of tromping through the jungle looking for exotic birds rather than basking on a beach.  Even more impressive is that he’s talked her into driving to destinations not on either of the coasts, heretofore known as "the other America", to watch migrating birds.  Never underestimate the power of love.

I thought of this after reading about the website of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. I’m sure Bert will find it interesting and maybe Mom might even take a look at it.  Me?  I’m going to see if they have anything on surly, balding cockatoos.

How to Insure You Spend the New Year on Your Back

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Want to make sure you don’t overdo it during the holidays?  Here’s a step-by-step procedure that worked for me this year:

  1. A couple of days after Christmas do something that tweaks your lower back.
  2. Spend two days lying on the floor with a heating pad.
  3. Recover just in time to travel to visit family for the weekend.
  4. Make sure someone in the family is contagious with a stomach bug.
  5. Catch the bug.
  6. Return home.
  7. 24 hours after returning notice a strange rumbling in your belly.
  8. Spend 48 hours counting the stripes in the wallpaper in your bathroom since you pretty much live there full time.
  9. Lose 8 pounds!
  10. Have your back tighten up just as you’re feeling better from the stomach bug and spend another night on the floor.

Happy new year!