Posted on 11/16/2001 1:27:05 PM PST by Lizavetta
CHESTER — The Green Mountain Union High School Board fired 11-year teacher Jay Van Stechelman after asserting that he had shown students movies with graphic sexual content and profanity without notifying their parents, and that he discussed with students phallic symbolism in the Christian church.
In response to a request by the Rutland Herald, school officials Thursday released two letters to Van Stechelman associated with the firing. One is a brief notification of the board’s decision to terminate him in a 3-2 vote after an executive session on Nov. 8, and the other is a three-page letter from Superintendent of Schools Ed Brown, dated Nov. 6, informing Van Stechelman of Brown’s intention to recommend his firing.
“It is my determination that you engaged in conduct which is unbecoming of a teacher and that you have failed to carry out the reasonable directions of your principal,” Brown wrote. “As such, I will recommend your immediate termination to the School Board.” Van Stechelman, who taught social studies and psychology, said after the firing that he was extremely upset by the board’s action, and had received many phone calls of support from students and other community members the next day. He reiterated his appreciation for community support Thursday, but declined to comment much further on the accusations against him.
“There will be a time for me to comment and I look forward to it, but I don’t want to compromise my legal case,” he said. His attorney, Donna Watts of the Vermont affiliate of the National Education Association in Montpelier, said Thursday she planned to file a grievance on Van Stechelman’s behalf today. She also commented only briefly on the accusations.
“These are allegations and he’s going to address them with the board through the grievance procedure,” she said. Watts and Van Stechelman decided against filing an injunction in court this week to keep the supervisory union from releasing the letters.
In the letter that outlines the allegations against Van Stechelman, Brown states that during the week of Oct. 29 the teacher showed two “R”-rated movies, “The Blair Witch Project” and “American History X,” in two separate classes. The first film, he said, contains repeated profanity, and the second contains profanity, nudity and “graphic depictions of sexual acts.”
Brown says in the letter that Van Stechelman admitted telling his class that Principal Carol Gilbert would not have approved of the movies, but that he thought the students could handle it. He also accuses Van Stechelman of veering from a well-established practice of notifying parents concerning “the nature and content of movies shown to your students.”
In addition to the films, Brown wrote in his letter that during the same week, in a class called “Vermont, The Nation, The World,” Van Stechelman discussed the Christian church as a male-dominated institution, describing the physical design of the church as “phallic.”
When students said they didn’t know what “phallic” meant, Brown wrote, Van Stechelman instructed a female student to read the dictionary definition of the word to the class. Brown says in the letter that these deeds, and Van Stechelman’s alleged admission of them, in addition to another incident last year, justified the firing. In that incident, according to the letter, Van Stechelman spoke graphically about genitals in a psychology class he was teaching.
Gilbert, who received a complaint about the discussion, told Van Stechelman, according to the letter, to “never again engage students in a discussion of similar issues, i.e., issues of a sexual nature.” Asha Bammarito, 18, a senior at the school whom Van Stechelman has coached on the track team for years, said Thursday that idea of not discussing sex in a psychology course was silly. She took the class last year in which the controversial discussion took place.
Bammarito said Van Stechelman, whom she and many other students say they consider a friend, crossed a line with the movies but that it wasn’t reason enough to fire him. “He just should have been suspended, and he should have come back to school,” she said. If the movies were inappropriate, she said, they also served a purpose. “That is what real life is about and we’re high school students and we should know what is really going on,” she said. “He always did give people the opportunity to leave the classroom, and repeated himself about that ... Some of the movies were very violent but I think he did a good job of showing us and explaining to us what the world was like.”
Other Green Mountain students said showing “R”-rated movies was not unusual in their school. Senior Jacob Parker, 18, who has collected more than 100 student signatures on a petition in support of Van Stechelman, said other teachers had shown equally disturbing movies, also “R” rated and not always with parental notification. He listed “Apocalypse Now,” “The Matrix,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Green Mile” and “Schindler’s List.”
Parker said there was one positive result of the firing in the way it united the students. “The atmosphere at the school after the students hearing the news on Friday ... it was gloomy and just a sad feeling everywhere,” he said, “but there was one really good thing that came out of it. The student body came together — it was really something awesome to witness.”
Students have commented over the past week that they felt close to Van Stechelman — that he treated them like adults, like friends and could get them to talk. “He was the only one who really let us think, he made us think,” said senior James Cole, who took psychology with the fired teacher. “It’s horrible that he’s gone, because the only things I really looked forward to were discussions in his class.”
“In my mind it’s exactly what a teacher was supposed to do,” Cole said. “I don’t really understand why we can’t have adult conversations. ... He was always so careful about not offending anyone. ... He always makes it completely clear that any belief is fine in this class, any beliefs are accepted in this class. Everyone’s equal and we’re not discriminating.”
Brown said Thursday that there was no policy in the district regarding “R”-rated movies, but there was a policy stating that “all materials shown should be appropriate.”
Contact Donna Moxley at donna.moxley@rutlandherald.com.
I'll bet.
Students have commented over the past week that they felt close to Van Stechelman — that he treated them like adults, like friends and could get them to talk.
I wonder how many of his students he's had sex with. This guy reads like a classic pedophile.
Hmmmmmmm.....
graphic depictions of sexual acts
It was nothing to get excited about, really.
The violence was disturbing (especially because it's easy to emphasize with the Nazi character), not the small amount of nudity.
He showed a couple of R-rated movies to a high school class, probably seniors.
From this I see you're ready to insinuate that he may be a child molester.
Read between the lines, xm177e2.
However, I will say that one way that pedophiles begin to 'steer' potential victims is to begin conversations that can bleed over into sexual experimentation...to wit: why in the name of God would a teacher of Social Studies and Psychology be having a conversation about phallic references in the Bible?
Not that I expect schools in Vermont to teach the Bible--(It was offered in my schools but was optional)--but the next likely class for that discussion to happen would be English or Literature, no?
Pedophile? Maybe, maybe not...Potential pedophile? Sounds like a classic case to me...
Perhaps we should issue blinders along with school books.
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