Posted on 05/06/2005 5:11:21 AM PDT by beaureguard
The Gwinnett County School Board voted early Friday to fire a Dacula High School science teacher who refused to raise the grade he gave a student athlete who appeared to be sleeping in class.
At the end of a Thursday night hearing that stretched into the early morning hours of Friday, the board decided by a 4-1 vote to terminate veteran physics teacher Larry Neace, school system spokeswoman Sloan Roach said.
Neace left the building after the ruling and would not comment.
His lawyers said they planned to appeal the dismissal to the State Board of Education within 30 days.
"These students lost a teacher who cared not only about their academic growth, but their growth as individuals," said Deidre M. Stephens-Johnson, who represented Neace.
While the board agreed 5-0 that Neace violated school board policy by using grades as a disciplinary measure, board member Carol Boye, who represents Dacula High School, voted against the termination. She declined to comment on her vote.
School system spokeswoman Sloan Roach said she did not know when the termination would take effect. "He was already suspended with pay until the outcome of this hearing," she said.
More than 200 students, parents and teachers packed Thursday night's hearing to see whether Neace would lose his job.
Gwinnett school officials said Neace was barred from campus for insubordination after he repeatedly refused to comply with the district policy that prohibits using grades as discipline.
Neace, who has taught at Dacula High for 23 years, was removed from class after he refused to raise the grade he had given a football player on an overnight assignment. Neace said he cut the student's perfect grade in half because he thought the student had fallen asleep at his desk the day the assignment was made.
"What we have in this case is a case of a pampered football athlete sleeping in class and being given favored treatment on an academic grade," said Michael Kramer, another of Neace's lawyers. "What we have here is the principal essentially attempting to coerce and intimidate a teacher."
School officials said they gave Neace a chance to restore the football player's grade. When he refused, they sent him home. He has not been allowed back at school since April 14, when he was told he could resign or face being fired.
Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks recommended to the board that Neace be fired. "He cannot have a policy that supersedes board policy," Wilbanks said. "He had no right to do that."
Neace said he had a practice of reducing the grades of students who waste time or sleep in class. His course syllabus warns that wasting class time can "earn a zero for a student on assignments or labs." No administrators had previously complained about the practice, which he adopted more than a decade ago, Neace said.
Neace said during the hearing that he also noted another student appeared to be sleeping in class on the same day. It was not clear Thursday what happened with the other student's grade.
School officials said Thursday that it appeared Neace allowed students to sleep in class. "He said it was not his job to wake up students," Assistant Principal Donald Mason said.
When asked Thursday if students sleep in his class, Neace responded, "Very rarely."
As school administrators presented their case to the school board, supporters of the teacher spilled over from the hearing room into a hallway outside. Some wore buttons saying "What's Up Doc?" and Dacula junior Clark Hurst wore a shirt bearing the acronym SADD, for "Students Against Dumping Doc."
Neace said he has been overwhelmed by the support he has received from students.
Posters calling for his return decorated the high school's halls. Some students wore T-shirts protesting the principal's action and passed out fliers saying, "Forget the whales, save Doc." Students also circulated a petition asking administrators to reinstate Neace.
"It's overwhelming -- the support, the phone calls, the e-mails, the [editorials] in the paper," Neace said Thursday afternoon. "I am getting support from all over the country. I got an e-mail from a professor at Rutgers University that said he wishes more teachers would do what I was doing, because it would make his job so much easier in the classroom if kids were prepared to take responsibility for what they do."
Neace said he got the nickname "Doc" years ago because of an exercise he led in class. That day he wore a lab coat and a stethoscope as he took the blood pressure of students. "Somebody said, 'Mr. Neace looks like a doctor,' " he said. "That was 22 years ago, and the name stuck."
Dacula High parent Nancy Penn said she supports Neace's methods. She said her daughter, a former student of Neace's, understood and respected his practice of penalizing students who fall asleep in class.
"As a parent, if my student was falling asleep in class, I would be upset," Penn said. "I do not have a problem with him using tactics to bring my student to attention in class. A teacher needs authority to govern his students. If someone takes away his authority, how can he manage his classroom?"
School officials said the issue was not that a student fell asleep in class. Instead, they said, Neace refused to abide by a school district policy that says, "Grading is not to be used for discipline purposes."
This teacher deserved to be fired.
#1 - The school system has a written policy that grades are not to be used for discipline. He clearly violated that policy.
#2 - He obviously doesn't care about following the policy. It may be a stupid policy. He could have told them that, and may have. But he showed utter disregard for school system policy.
#3 - He showed very poor judgement. I once fell asleep in my dad's Senior English class. When I woke up, everyone in the room thought my dad would blast me. BTW, my dad was a NOTORIOUS stickler for discipline and class-room behavior.
Anyway, what the rest of the class DIDN'T know was that I had a road trip basketball game the night before AND had been doing some other work at home that week. I didn't fall asleep because I didn't care about the class, I fell asleep because I was dog-tired. It also helped that I made straight A's in english.
Lots of times, being an athlete in HS makes you a target. This athlete did the work and received a 100. Then the teacher decided to punish him because he thought he fell asleep.
Stupid. And unreasonable. He got what he deserved, if this story is correct.
In most of my classes, class participation handled these issues effectively. If you didn't participate, your grade suffered.
Now we know where the guys that sleep on the job come from.
Put me on the side of the board and the football player her.
Who cares what the hell he's doing in class.. If he's passing the class and passing the tests, who gives a crap if he takes a nap.
My biggest pet peeve with teachers. Promote the stupid kids who can't get the answers right on there homework or tests, and punish those who pass the tests.
I dunno. "What about all the babies I didn't throw out of windows?" doesn't usually get you very far, in my experience ;)
Anyway, it looks to me like he fought the law, and the law won. Again. He made a bad choice, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for guys who look to the lawyers to rescue them from the consequences of their own bad choices.
He told me about how discouraging and frustrating it was to have to fight above the noise and in-your-face ennui of a hard-core group of disrupters whose bad attitudes and behavior were infecting other students in adverse ways.
Just remind him that someone has to man the deep-fryers of the world, and eventually his attitude will pay off ;)
It sounds like a petty classroom dictator got their just reward.
Tom Daschle wanted to install lights on all baskeball courts so that kids could play basketball until 2 in the morning.
Then he wanted to buy them alarm clocks so they could get up in the morning.
Then he wanted to pay them to go to school.
Same old liberal clap trap buying votes for himself with your money at every turn.
Underachiever? He smoked the assignment.. Got a perfect score.
Meanwhile, the Dumb Kid who got a D- on the assignment while paying attention in class, gets pushed through the system, while the perfect score student is punished.
The teacher was completely out of line IMO.
I had a series of illnesses in High School that caused several absences during the years I attended. I made good grades, but was penalized due to attendance policies. No matter how hard I worked on the assignments, it didn't matter.... so I gave up after my sophmore year....barely graduating by the skin of my teeth.
BTW, I eventually went to college and graduated with scholastic honors.....much to the surprise of my parents, friends and "old teachers". *chuckle*
Yes, see post #46
Disrupters are another issue. If somebody who knows the stuff, smokes the test, wants to take a nap in class, I have no problem with it.
The appropriate action by a teacher to combat this, is to TEACH SOMETHING while the student is sleeping, and have that SOMETHING on the next test.
What the hell is the teacher doing in that class where you can snooze through it and still smoke the assignments and tests?
Good riddance teach.
That is the perfect way to handle the situation if you want students attention during class.
It's apparent to me that this teacher wasn't teaching anything during the class.
If you want to punish the sleepers, TEACH DURING CLASS, and put it on the test!
BTW, What ever happened to pop quizes? Have they become politically incorrect? Do they do too much damage to the children's emotions?
Pathetic.
Falliong asleep is not wasting time. The student's score was perfect.
Why? Because he fell asleep in class he must be a dumb jock who cheats? Sheesh.
I side with the teacher. She may not be able to prove the cheating on the paper, but she can take off points for sleeping in class.
Then the teacher should have raised suspicion of cheating in his defense. Otherwise, you're fabricating issues to justify your prejudices.
I have learned more knowledge from my Father, Jeopardy, and the History Channel, than I EVER have from any school teacher.
That is why public schools suck. Teachers have no control over their classes because of whiny students who do not follow the rules, over indulgent parents and their attorneys. School boards tend to be occupied by bureaucrats who have little or no experience inside the class room.
The rules are the rules they should apply to the jocks too.
The mystery medal is:
A) Gold
B) Chromium
C) Lead
D) Tin
If any student asked what the question meant, he'd say, "It means you weren't in class, the day I mentioned the mystery medal."
Bad and vindictive teacher wouldn't that the kind of support this guy does.
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