InterestingStories

     This happened around twenty years ago when I was a teacher in a suburban school.
     I was appointed to my position, working with a great, mature principal with whom I got on very well. I could go into his office after school and talk over things and get his advice on how I could improve my teaching. We remained friends in the years to come.
     A couple of years later he resigned his position.  The outgoing principal advised me to resign as well, because he could foresee future problems in the school and that I’d be better off out of it. Foolishly I ignored his advice, and I suffered for it as we will soon see.
     A new principal was appointed, and things went well at first. The first hint of a problem was that the Chairperson of the Board of Trustees resigned and the word got around that she was pressured out of her role. I knew her well and she was the type of person who was not going to be anyone’s “yes” person, and it became apparent that the new principal had designed that he was going to be “the king of the castle” and no one was going to get in his way.
     The new head of our teaching block was the newly appointed deputy principal, and we initially got on well.
     During the year the new senior staff were appointed, there was a spare teaching position in the school, and the principal was planning that his wife was going to take up that position once she graduated, registered as a teacher and gained her practicing certificate. But when statistic revealed that the school roll had fallen to the point where the spare position disappeared, the principal had a problem. When his wife qualified, there was no position in the school for her to come to, and because her training was conducted mainly by distance learning instead of at a college of education, it was thought that she would find it very difficult to get a teaching position anywhere in the city.
     This is where the principal decided on a plan. If he could get a staff member to resign, then his wife would be able to take up the vacant position. The board of trustees would not stand in the way, because the new chairperson was inexperienced and was basically “under his thumb”. That’s when he decided that I was the weakest link.
     I had just had my yearly performance appraisal and was deemed totally satisfactory. But he decided that I was incompetent, and in a meeting in his office, he said that I was not performing satisfactorily and that I should resign. If I knew then what I know now, I would have recognized that as “constructive dismissal”, written minutes of that meeting as a documentary record. I resisted, and got the teachers union involved.
Also, the deputy principal started to find all kinds of faults in my teaching, which actually resulted in bullying, and I realize that this man was being the principal’s “hatchet man” to make my time at the school so difficult that I would resign. The union advisor told me that the principal and deputy principal were not my friends, and I would be better off finding another position. This led me to think that the union advisor was playing both sides instead of standing up for me.
     So, I started applying for positions, and landed a senior teacher’s position at a local intermediate school. This was a promotion for me. It was reported to me that the principal was so angry that I was going to a promotion that he telephoned the other school in order to bad-mouth me and try to upset my appointment. Also, I found out later that he got my two referees into his office and demanded that they cancel my references. I wanted to go to the Employment Services to complain but these two teachers begged me not to because if I implicated them, the principal would make their lives in the school a misery. Out of respect for them, I didn’t take it further. In retrospect I should have. I was also told that the guy had told other staff members not to give me any support.
     However, I wrote to the Teachers Council and told them that I did not consider him an honorable person and detailed to them that he pushed me out of his school to make way for his wife.
     I found out later that because he didn’t want any Asian teachers in his school (there were three Asian teachers there), he forced them out by falsely accusing them of being incompetent. I knew that this was totally unfair and illegal, because they were three of the most loved and competent teachers in that school.
     He had aspirations of gaining a position in a larger school, but over the years, although applying for positions he was never successful. I think it is because word had got around about how he was treating good staff unfairly and no one wanted to appoint him. After quite a number of years, he moved effectively sideways into a similar school in another part of the country.
I have written this account to warn teachers to document everything, even if they think that everything is going fine for them in their school. It is a good idea that for every two weeks, email the principal for a report on their teaching and asking for any advice he can give them to improve their teaching practice. Also, if they have to send a disruptive pupil to the office for correction, follow it up with an email describing the problem and asking for a response of what was done to correct the misbehavior. If the teacher suspects that he is being micro-managed and excessively criticized, email concerns to the principal, take a support person, preferably the school union delegate, to a meeting and have the meeting minuted. If the bully continues or if the principal sides with the bully, continue to document every instance, and send a copy to the principal. Then, make an appointment with the Employment Service and forward copies of your documentation to them.
     I would be reluctant to trust the teachers union, because I have heard of union advisors and field officers “running with the fox and the hounds” in order to try and come to a compromise, instead of calling a bad or manipulative principal out on his illegal conduct. I would go directly to the Employment Service because they are there to fully support employees who are being shafted by these arrogant school principals who think they can treat their teachers any way they please.
     What comforts me is that this particular principal is nearing retirement, and has never been able to achieve the promotion and the higher salary level that he expected. He will remain a small-time principal of a low decile school in a part of the country where no one knows where it is and if they did, they wouldn’t want to go there.

The following happened about twentysix years ago when I was still in the teaching profession.

I had just finished a year managing a two-teacher rural school in the North of the country and had landed another position at a city school in the East of the North Island.

This school was a three-teacher suburban school, and it was a long-term relieving position for a year. The principal was very nice to me when I first started, but this changed a few weeks into the first term. The problems start when I had a very misbehaving and disruptive child in my class and when all my attempts to keep her under control failed, I sent her to the principal’s office. Unfortunately the principal didn’t like having misbehaving children sent to her. She didn’t want to be inconvenienced, and decided to blame the classroom teacher when children misbehaved and became disruptive. In my view, if a child became disruptive and started spoiling the peace of the classroom and the lessons, the school management should deal with them as a backup and support for the teacher. This didn’t happen with this principal.

What started to happen was that she started to exhibit conduct that I can only describe as workplace bullying. I put up with it for her refusal to support me, and her often angry behaviour for a while. Once incident happened in the staffroom where a young teacher made loud remarks about other teachers, directed at me, doing the same job as her, being paid more just because they had been teacher longer. The principal was in the room at the time and she did nothing. I think that she should have told that teacher that what she was saying was inappropriate.

After more instances of unfair criticism and micro-managing, I went and consulted a teachers’ union advisor who, in the end, couldn’t really do much. In hindsight, I should have gone and consulted the Employment Service. I think I would have got better results that way. However, when the stress started to get to me, I consulted my doctor, who incidentally was also a psychiatrist. He confirmed that I was experiencing extreme stress and gave me three months sick leave. The principal wasn’t pleased about that, seeing that it was right at the end of the term, and the school holidays were not included in the sick leave. So, it was one week before the holidays, and two weeks afterward.

Halfway through the holidays, I decided that I was not going to return to the school, so I telephoned the principal and told her that I was not going to return. I was not contracted as a permanent employee, and so as a relieving teacher, I didn’t need to give notice of my resignation. When I went back to my doctor and told him, he thought that I was being very brave, but agreed with my decision. I said to him that I would like to do some volunteer relief teaching as a form of therapy, and he agreed.

So I organised to do volunteer relieving at a local high school and they were happy to have me at no cost to them and this went well for around ten days into the new term. Then I received a phone call from the small school principal to say that my sick leave was to be excused from “all duties” and that my relieving at the high school meant that she was going to cancel my sick leave. She did not give me the opportunity to tell her that it was what my doctor advised me to do as part of the therapy. Anyhow, I was happy to cut the umbilical cord with her and be shot of her and her bullying.

For the rest of the year, I engaged in paid relief teaching which continued to pay the bills, and established a good rapport with the relief teaching organisation in that area so that I got regular work at a number of schools around the region.

The next year, I moved from that city to a full-time permanent position at an Auckland school. I continued teaching for the next nine years until I decided to call it a day and look for a new career.

I landed a position as a Registrar in the Family Court and afterward as a Victim Advisor in the Criminal Court at the same location (Manukau, Auckland). I held the latter position until I retired at the age of 68.

While I was working at the court, I read in the local newspaper that a school principal was arrested for embezzling over $30,000 from her school by issuing fake involces for projects that the teachers were supposed to have participated in.  It appeared that the teachers involved knew nothing about the projects, and the delay in discovering the fraud was  because she had created such a climate of fear in the school that the teachers were afraid to come forward for fear of having to have the time at the school made into a miserable existence, or being forced out of their jobs.   I discovered that this was the same lady principal that bullied me in the previous small school!  Knowing her, I can quite believe that if she wanted to make it appear that a teacher is incompetent, she could manipulate that by withdrawing support  and blaming the teacher for disruptive students by not correcting any disruptive pupils sent to her office.

She and her husband protested their innocence and said they were going to clear their names, but when presented with overwhelming evidence of their guilt as successive teachers came forward, she was forced to enter a guilty plea and was appropriately sentenced.  Hence she lost her career, and any reputation that might have been gained for her past years of service.

It is a belief of mine that no one really gets away with anything that is sinful, especially when it hurts or damages others. The majority of school principals are dedicated, hardworking individuals who treat their staff fairly and are fully supportive when there are problems in the classroom. But there are some who allow the power of their position to go to their heads and they treat their staff like low grade servants. And if they are bullies, which some of them are, they treat their targets like dogs, and yet are very sociable to everyone else. That is the deceptiveness of a bully which makes it difficult to prove that the bullying is actually taking place. The only answer is to document every incident, email for confirmation when an instruction or criticism is given, and to have a “spypen” handy to record any conversations that would conclusively prove the bullying behaviour.

I had a friend in another school who was bullied by a fellow teacher, and the principal refused to believe her until she left her digital recorder recording on her desk when she went to lunch. All the comments that were made behind her back were recorded for the Employment Service to hear and she ended up walking out of that school with a $25,000 settlement.

It just shows that when someone mistreats an innocent person, it all comes back at them.

Here is an interesting article that exposes the type of woman this principal is and how her life came crashing down around her ears. https://www.metromag.co.nz/society/society-schools/mr-mrs-gray

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