The school personnel report for October lists five who are already leaving the district after one month of school.
Oh, I’m sure there’ll be a “reasonable” explanation. LOL
Didn't all the School Committee and most other city officials declare that money was the only reason any teachers ever left the Melrose schools?
perhaps some teachers showed up in September "visibly pregnant" and were "shown the door"?
It's disgusting that teachers leave during the school year. They children get emotionally invested in them and the teacher abandons the children as if it's nothing.
Last spring I talked to two school committee members at the pro-override meetings. They confirmed that salaries and spouses changing jobs were the only reasons why teachers left. They said that's why we had to vote for the 5 million dollars, that teachers would stay with the new contract. Obviously, we had to trust them because the exit interviews were private. The override passed and teachers are still leaving. Feels as if they were lying to us all along.
The business manager is leaving next week, too. This report says the Dept. Chair for Global Language is leaving. It's not about workload or money. She used to run Art and Music too, but that workload was reduced by the override and new dept. chair.
Teachers got at least 10% raises in the new contract. Global Language chair is working less and making more by her new dept. chair contract. She lives in Melrose, so Taymore can't use the excuse of moving away to live cheaper. Perhaps it's true that they all leave because no one wants to work under Taymore.
Will either Paul or Monica fire
Taymore when they become Mayor?
Who is going to fire Ruth Clay?
How about firing Vanny or will he stay as “Deputy Mayor?
The tally now is four out of five new elementary principal and a new middle school principal just in the last two years. Only Roosevelt School and the High School principal are still here. With the business manager and the department head, that totals eight admins who left over just the last two years. Didn't she appoint almost every one of the eight to those positions? Her appointees are all jumping ship. That's not a good omen.
Anyone who believes that there is a single one of the administrators or school committee members who is credible or well-qualified has a problem. The only possible exception is the MHS principal who is said to be a decent human, though totally inarticulate and poorly educated (he's a former gym teacher, for heaven sake, so forget any ability to discern when it comes to actual academics). Edunonsense is all that any of them can utter, and even at that, they can't manage simple grammar or punctuation (including the outgoing foreign language chair, who was always lousy and one of Joe Casey's poor hires).
Taymore has and always has been a toxic and terrible administrator who makes the worst possible choices for hires. It's no surprise that many are leaving, even the former sycophants who only had a job because no one else but Taymore/Melrose would hire them in the first place, but they've now accrued (at Melrose taxpayer expense) some of the Peter-Principle "qualifications" that can get them bumped up into their next positions of incompetence and earning far more than they are worth. The administrators who are still here are types like the disgusting and proven incompetents like the two assistant superintendents (who've failed at virtually every job opening outside Melrose for which they've applied, hence their remaining here).
Anyone who believed that crap about educator retention being a primary justification for the override is just ill-informed and/or as idiotic and dishonest as those promoting the boondoggle.
See the Boston Globe article below. Sadly, Melrose admins appear inclined to act in the same manner as those in Concord, NH. They deny. They punish the child. They lawyer up. They certainly don't go public with scandals unless someone else does so first. Then they send their attorney to criticize and attack the child, the parent, or anyone else who speaks truth to power.
WHAT SHE SAID
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A seventh grader was punished for questioning a teacher’s conduct. Now that teacher is accused of rape.
By Stephanie Ebbert Globe Staff,October 9, 2019, 8:04 p.m.
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Ana Goble, pictured with her mother, Kate Frey, was suspended for speaking up about a teacher later accused of rape.SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF/GLOBE STAFF
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In what world does a school not only ignore concerns about inappropriate behavior by a teacher but even suspend the student who raised them?
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That would be Concord, N.H., where the consequences are still unfolding five years later, with the teacher accused of rape, the superintendent and principal placed on leave, and the whistle-blower, Ana Goble, being honored at Thursday night’s annual fund-raiser for the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence.
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“All of us are certainly in solidarity with her, but we’re also there to learn from her. What she did is something that many adults struggle with every day,” said Amanda Grady Sexton, the coalition’s director of public affairs, pointing to people’s uncertainty about reporting seemingly problematic behavior. “If the adults in her life listened to her concerns, there very well could have been a different outcome in this case.”
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Suffice it to say, no one listened to Goble. As a seventh-grader, she had noticed that a popular special education teacher, Primo “Howie” Leung, spent an inordinate amount of time with a select group of her female classmates, holding private lunches in his classroom and choosing them, over most others, to join him on field trips he ran for the “Student Ambassadors” program.
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“He excluded other students,” Goble said in an interview. “He just acted really weird around certain girls, to the point I was so uncomfortable my stomach would hurt.”
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In the fall of seventh grade, when Goble asked why she wasn’t among the ambassadors invited on those trips, Leung blamed her attitude, pointing to the Rundlett Middle School’s motto of “PRIDE” — Perseverance, Respect, Integrity, Discipline and Empathy — she said.
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“He told me that I was not exhibiting enough PRIDE behavior, and he chooses who goes on these field trips or who he eats lunch with based on their behavior,” Goble recalled.
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He seemed especially close with one particular girl, Goble said, so she tried to raise the issue with a friend they had in common. That week, Goble also told her mother, who suggested they tread carefully in reporting to the administration, since she had already seemingly offended Leung.
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But they didn’t have time to report, they said. By morning, Goble and her parents were summoned to the principal’s office.
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“Immediately, he called us in and told us Ana was spreading malicious and slanderous gossip and that she would be suspended for three days,” said Goble’s mother, Kate Frey.
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The family backed off.
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“Unfortunately, in hindsight, we didn’t push back as much as we should have,” Frey said. “We listened to the principal, assuming that he would have done his due diligence.”
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Goble was kicked out of Student Ambassadors and served three days’ suspension, two of them in school. But the principal didn’t move her out of Leung’s classroom, and Ana soon felt he was picking on her.
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“She kind of became the girl who cried wolf,” her mother said.
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Goble, who hadn’t previously had problems in school, became a bitter but resigned seventh-grader.
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“It seemed very out of proportion,” Goble said. “I had known people that had gotten into fistfights in middle school and had gotten a day suspension.”
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But she also felt guilty for spreading gossip. So she shut up.
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Flash-forward to April, when her father got a call from the Concord police.
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Leung had allegedly been spotted kissing a high school student in his car. The school did an internal investigation, according to news reports, and Leung continued teaching through March. But when the Department of Education got involved, so did police, whose investigation brought them back to seventh grade.
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The girl Goble had worried about back then told police she had been involved in a sexual relationship with Leung when she was 13 and 14 years old in 2015 and 2016 when he was working at a summer camp at Fessenden School in Newton. In Massachusetts, he’s being charged with aggravated rape of a child, among other charges. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts, according to news reports.
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Goble’s father immediately apologized for not backing her up. And her family demanded action from the school so that the same situation wouldn’t happen again.
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In an April 29 letter sent by the lawyer, Goble and her family demanded that the school district expunge her record of disciplinary action, train employees how to respond to claims of sexual misconduct, and pay her $15,000 as an acknowledgement of harm.
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Their lawyer was told she’d need to sign a confidentiality agreement.
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Absolutely not, the family said.
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“We would never support any kind of settlement like that because that’s how we got there to begin with,” Frey said. “In order to make true change, we had to come out and tell our story.”
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They spoke to the Concord Monitor newspaper in June, after the superintendent was quoted as saying she was unaware of any past complaints of inappropriate behavior about Leung — less than two weeks after receiving the letter from Goble’s lawyer.
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Dean Eggert, the lawyer representing the school district, which ultimately settled without a confidentiality agreement, would not explain why the district had initially sought it.
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“I can’t comment on anything that would implicate the privacy concerns of a family,” he said.
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Since Goble and her family spoke out, other members of the community demanded the suspensions of the principal and the superintendent and greater transparency from the school district, which is now refusing to release its report on the matter.
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The School Board’s president, Jennifer Patterson, did not respond to a request for comment.
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Concord, of course, is also the home of St. Paul’s School, which rallied around student Owen Labrie when he was accused of raping an underclassman, Chessy Prout — also in 2014. But Concord is by no means special, said New Hampshire US Representative Ann McLane Kuster. No place is.
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Kuster attended the same Concord schools as Goble. “A classmate of mine became pregnant from a teacher back in the 1970s,” she said. “Now fast-forward to this extraordinary young woman, Ana. She was 13 years old at the time. I just want to compliment her courage and grace.”
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In 2016, Kuster revealed on the House floor that she had been sexually assaulted in the past. Thursday night, through a video tribute, Kuster will be among those honoring Goble in hopes of educating the public to recognize “a pattern of grooming behavior” that they now believe they should have seen in Concord.
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“To have this happen in a school system where every child was vulnerable because administrators did not listen to the concerns — that turned out to be highly attuned — of a 13-year-old girl,” Kuster said, “is unacceptable.”
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Update: This story has been changed to correct the description of US Representative Ann McLane Kuster’s experience with sexual assault.
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“What She Said” is an occasional column on gender issues. Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com
This above post has nothing to do with Melrose at all. Someone should take it off immediately!
School problems never solved only becoming worse.
What, throwing more money at it didn’t solve the problems? I’m shocked!
Do you understand that the mayor can not fire the superintendent? The school committee would have to take that action.
Kevin,
Perhaps you don't understand that for fifteen years the superintendents most definitely took their marching orders from RD (you apparently never heard or don't remember Rob talking about his "marriage" with Joe C). GI was a total shill for Taymore (from even before she was hired, being on the cheering squad with the MEF witches who forced Dolan's hand into hiring Taymore, even though he wanted the other candidate, who was actually qualified, had a ph.D and real experience as a sitting superintendent, none of which Taymore had). GI didn't have the brains to think an independent thought, so it was always Driscoll calling the shots at that point (and to a large extent even with Dolan). She still is, and Brodeur most likely doesn't have the cojones to stand up to her (hope we're proven wrong on that count).
You are correct that this is not the way the separation of powers is supposed to work, but Dolan and the crooked local city pols destroyed even a semblance of appropriate boundaries. The made their deals and cooked their votes behind the scenes (still do), despite the laws that forbid that. PB is used to a statehouse that has zero accountability and no requirement of transparency (doesn't have to abide by the open meeting or public records laws), and he was totally contemptuous of those things when he served on the BOA. So there is zero reason to expect that he will bring integrity and true accountability to our local governance. We can hope he does, but there is no reason to expect that to be the case, especially with such a ridiculously entitled and dumb young parent population that bought into the "oneMelrose" nonsense (a ridiculous contradiction in terms, if ever there was one).
Melrose is a backwards little burb with lots of fancy-pants oh-so-PC pretentions, which it violates routinely with the underlying true state of affairs, which is anything but PC.
If our new mayor decides he doesn't care for Driscoll's choice of a new hire (and you can bet she will control every micro-aspect of the process, as she did before), then he will have to duke it out in a power struggle. Don't count on it. It would be fun to watch the snake venom emerge and scare the poor boy (who's deluded if he thinks he's strong enough or smart enough to move pieces on the preordained chess board of MD). He's Mr. GoAlong, which is how he got where he is now. There isn't one shred of reason to think he'll bite the hands that got him that position, even if the process is totally corrupt and the new hire as grossly substandard as the last two. The One Brigade will not stand for any dissent within, even if their own children are being harmed and their tax dollars squandered on more of the continuing stream of stupidity, bad decisions, and total lack of thoughtful vision. (It is amusing, however, to watch them all squirm and flail about the Beebe now that there is sufficient public pushback, even if it's missing the serious considerations that a more informed public would have grasped long ago.)
Hasn't this nasty and vindictive post been removed?
Seems like a well-stated bit of astute, if feisty, social commentary by someone who actually cares about the community and isn't a phony or a baby like the one protesting the post!