Now… I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.
Almost a year, in fact.
That’s largely because about a year ago I was in the middle of making my exit from the fucking gongshow that is public education in Canada.
And trust me – at least here in British Columbia?
Public education is a dumpster-fire. The corruption and near-collapse of the system goes quite deep. To start what will be a very long article in this series, the system is filled with ladder climbers, inept career bureaucrats with shitty philosophies, and other examples of cronyism via nepotistic bootlickers galore. And yet even still, as any living system is, it is complex and diverse, and no one single experience from within it can be applied to similar systems exactly.
That means we need to stop for a second and acknowledge something: Broken systems are often filled with wonderful people who joined these institutions for the right reasons. I’ve met plenty of them – people who think that by helping kids learn and grow, they are making the world a better place. And fuck if they ain’t trying their best.
We do have a small victory every now and then. Usually it’s enough to keep us going. But in the war of simple attrition, as my own case signifies, the good folks are losing out to the inept and shitty ones.
Now, never fear – I’m going to do all the normal things I do for this series, such as abstaining from using names when speaking negatively, etc. to obfuscate the people and organizations involved. But I am simultaneously also going to be brutally honest about my experiences. I promise truth and transparency pretty frequently, remember?
That means that I absolutely refuse to lie to cover the asses of shitty people.
I feel it’s important to take note early on that I have transitioned away from incredibly hopeful and bright-eyed in my early years of the past decade of teaching. My inherent bias that I am trying to overcome is that I am now very jaded by my lived experiences.
Like many other folks in my same vein who have either retired or been forced out, I’m also pretty pissed at some of the hot garbage I’ve witnessed.
There’s an old statistic to that – that between the ineptitude and ableist faux vigor of the post-secondary educator-education systems, and the first five years of teaching – teachers quit in overwhelming numbers within these first five years.
I could get into a longer diatribe about how the assistant dean of my teacher-education program was calling me in my free time because of the complaints I and other tuition paying students had about their academia-laden system. But for all our sake, I’ll abstain.
Overall?
Well, the long story short is that I was put through the ringer – I surmise because I disclosed my disabilities. Even now almost two years later I’m still rightfully pissed off.
I quit teaching in the public system as a result of it all.
Despite what the libelous and slanderous rumors may suggest.
Oh don’t worry, we’ll get to how slander and libel works in a bit, never fear. I intend to exonerate my own reputation as much as I damn the reputation of others, albeit shielding them with anonymity. Which is much kinder and more than they deserve.
So where the fuck do we begin?
Well…
In terms of timelines, I spent about a decade in the public school system, primarily in the middle to upper years in a small town. I worked exclusively within British Columbia’s Public Education system. I also taught pretty much everything at some point, sans the hyper specific upper level pre-university courses outside my subject areas.
PE, Art, Foods, English, History, Drama, Careers – you name it, I likely taught it. Luckily for me I often had enough real-world life experience to make it work, such as years of Cook experience for teaching things like Foods class or periods of time as a gym rat for PE.
I’m still qualified as an educator, of course. I have two degrees from UBC – a Bachelor of Arts with focuses in Drama, History, and English, and a Bachelor of Education, specializing in Secondary Education. I still pay my $80 every year to keep my teaching license, as much as I do want to let it lapse as a matter of principle to tell the broken system to fuck off.
Despite the dog’s breakfast of classes I had to prepare for – often 4-6 subjects at a time… The first years were great!
See, I volunteered at my old high school every reading break for the last few years of my undergraduate degree. Those experiences were uplifting. I got to help out, and really experience the job. And because I was only five years younger than some of the upper year students, I felt I had good camaraderie and respect from the majority.
Ah, to be young and naive again – to truly feel like you’re making a difference in some youth’s life.
I think I liked working at the uppermost levels the most in the regular high school. For every shitty experience I had of some entitled fuckhead trying to get me fired, or start shit of some sort with another poor kid, or what-have-you, I would have five great relationships – where the teens were mature enough at that higher age group to understand that us teachers truly did just want them to grow and prosper.
You show a kid unconditional love, the kind they’re maybe missing from their parents? Just show up to mentor and share what knowledge you have? Hell, sometimes you feel like they might stand a chance.
Because god damn is some of that shit horrible.
Over the past decade I’ve filed abuse reports against parents, helped kids through sexual assaults, and have generally tried to show up for kids when they’re suicidal and at their lowest fucking lows. I’ve had parents stalk and harass me, kids swear and curse at me, the whole gamut.
Being a queer disabled person in a school, you do things like burn your lunch hour to sit in Diversity club just to try and show folks that not every adult hates them for who they are. Fuck, if I had known what Demisexuality and genderlessness were at puberty, maybe I wouldn’t have had such a fucked up time in growing myself.
But I digress, with the shitty stuff also came the good.
There’s nothing that compares to the feeling of pride when somebody succeeds whom you were rooting for. Or when growth finally comes to some dumbass who found self-awareness in fits and starts. I often make jokes about being a shitty monk. But damn if there isn’t a strange sort of catharsis in watching somebody evolve beyond your expectations for them as a teacher.
Now, I can’t speak for every education system, only the one I saw.
But problems outside of the usual dumbass behaviour and entitlement rarely came from the students.
Hell, the older they were, the more self-awareness they had as teenagers. And you could always have a civil discussion to teach them the pieces they were missing, given enough time and enough of an open mind.
See, back when I started in the system, British Columbia had come off a teacher strike – to protest the illegal stripping of contract language via the previous government of fourteen years prior in 2001. Jobs were hard to find. And thus, the government and the education system management got cocky as fuck.
They started treating employees like dirt.
For my first several years, I scrambled from contract to contract, often struggling to survive at barely half-time wages. The name of the game was nepotism and cronyism.
To get the contracts, you had to make sure the principals and school board office staff loved you, because job postings were heavily manipulated and catered to favorites. That meant not just doing your job to the utmost. It meant bootlicking, brown-nosing, and going above and beyond by volunteering your time for clubs, sports, events, and what have you.
The people that didn’t go above and beyond didn’t get rehired, no matter how good of an educator they were. And the toxicity of the school district via the school board staff led to enormous attrition of qualified staff at both local schools and the school board office. I watched as we lost multiple assistant superintendents, human resources officers, and principals to the toxicity of the district at the upper management level.
So it created this toxic duality – there was no work-life balance. Even if you were rocking a half-time contract, you found yourself working full-time hours or more.
This was coupled with the well-known fact that principals could simply hire whoever the fuck they wanted by waiting until the school year started and “appointing” whoever they wanted to any given position.
Which made the contract negotiations, the union, pretty much all of it completely bullshit.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I actually like unions that support their members. And it really is too bad that the BCTF sold out its membership at some point after those last strikes.
In my experience, despite going up the chain and dealing with the union on and off for years, even serving on the executive of the local myself, I became completely disillusioned. No matter how many times I asked for information, clarification, or help from the BCTF, I got ignored or fucked over. Either by being told to directly accept fault when there was no fault on my part, or to grovel and beg before the horrifically corrupt and inept school board office staff who wielded their authority like literal dictators.
Again, exceptions to being ignored.
See, the upper echelon of the union was nonexistent, and used (and maybe still uses) the divide between the “local” and the provincial “BCTF” to dodge accountability – arguing that everything is decided and handled at the local level. Problem being, my particular local after my first few years was full of power-mongers for the majority of my teaching experience. People who wanted the sway of those in power. Or who wanted political power for themselves. Whose philosophies involved bowing and begging before administrative middle-men pencil pushers who mismanaged publicly funded coffers. The argument was that this would bestow favor and kinder relations, and completely missed the point of what a union fucking exists for in the first place. To advocate and fight for the employees of said union. This awkward and misguided idolizing also applied to trustees – usually old, white, retired administrators who had no fucking clue as to what was going on in their own fucking system they had been elected to manage.
Combine all this toxicity, corruption, and shittiness with a superintendent that believed strongly in Margaret Thatcher style disruptive management, where management thought employees scared for their jobs would “work harder?”
Fuck it was bad.
Often, the only thing that kept me going as the years wore on was the feeling of being comrades with my fellow teaching and support staff. Which speaks to the general integrity of teachers perhaps. I almost NEVER saw the ground-floor staff fuck things up. No matter how many toxic, entitled parents, or corrupt school board office staff fucked with us, my colleagues remained professional and based in common sense. Every fucking instance of corruption, mismanagement, or abuse of power and authority usually came at the principal level and up.
And hoo-boy was there mismanagement.
Once, our principal made the mistake of showing us the budget.
Now, despite having a math-related learning disability, I’m a bit of a numbers cryptid. I quickly found that a majority of the approximate one point six MILLION dollars that exchange-student tuition brought in was being squirreled away in “administration” and school board office misuse. The school itself maybe got half the money it was bringing in.
Budgets were always suspect and lacked any detailed information. Inflation was blamed for continual cuts and reallocations in budget after budget, even as enrollment increased and staff were cut and kept strung along on hairstring contracts.
It just wore on and on and on.
I must acknowledge that every workplace has these issues of broken hierarchy. Useless managers and administrators that fuck up and mistreat or favor certain employees for a myriad of reasons.
Human bias and self-centeredness is a bitch, eh?
But if we get to a list of my gripes with these general examples of how capitalism is busted, we’d be here for weeks.
The first really rocky period I encountered with the school system came from the year I taught at an alternative school.
After some pretty violent incidents from students, including my colleagues almost getting punched, chairs being thrown, etc… My disabilities – especially my anxiety disorder, were strung to the limit. I literally broke down, and despite asking for help and setting out my disabilities with psychiatrist letters of direction, I was harassed and belittled. Some things, such as seeking medical support for my disabilities for the first time in my life, were good.
Other things continued to be toxic.
Once I was identified as “sticking out,” I was intimidated and harassed. Which says a lot about how fucked up a system is when it is supposed to be responsible for special needs students and actively attacks it’s own employees when they disclose a disability.
For instance, outside of her jurisdiction, my professional development was denied by the superintendent herself, some vague threat of presence that was threatened even more through the nebulous new position for HR she had created. That was because their actual trained human resources staff member at the board office had quit, and the appointment of the new position was to get around hiring an actual Human Resources trained professional to keep more toadies in paid positions and consolidate power.
I still have the voice recordings of when they hauled me into the board office for meetings to subtly threaten my job, again, all for requesting a transfer out of the alternate school – asking for disability accommodation.
I have a recording of the guy interrogating me saying: “I don’t know why you would want to work in a system whose philosophies you disagree with.”
This was in reference to me disagreeing with the philosophies of the school board – of forced homogenization of content and grade levels until every teacher was forced to be an elementary style generalist. (Which any teacher can tell you is fucking stupid at upper years when university acceptance is on the line.)
And following these meetings, when I refused to roll over and admit whatever discipline they wanted to falsely level against me – I was still denied pretty much everything my psychiatrist recommended in her letter to them. The ableist fuckers.
I was forced to open a Human Rights Tribunal case in my harassed, intimidated, and traumatized state to get them to back off and stop harassing me with these forced meetings. All while union support was largely nonexistent outside the school building itself.
How ironic, eh? That a disabled employee who asked for disability accommodation was not only denied such in a system preaching absolute capitulation to student needs, but actively harassed and intimidated for disclosing said disability. The levels of hypocrisy in the BC Public Education system are staggering.
Not to mention my local union was absolutely useless and actively hard-nosed against any of my disability accommodations because they thought a transfer would set precedent and damage the already broken and nepotistic hiring process. As if their weak contract language was my disability’s fault!
The straw that broke the camel’s back came with the onset of the pandemic.
Now, I’m no virologist – but I did take pre-nursing anatomy for my science credit in undergrad, and in addition to contracting Covid in February before lockdown, (which I realized much later was Covid after having gone to work due to lack of sick days with full-blown pneumonia…) I got pretty vocal on twitter about best health practices and how badly the BC health authorities were fucking things up. See, I’m aware of how the immune system works with those cool little vectors of transmission and killer T and memory cells and all that. And it’s always been pretty obvious that for political reasons via government direction, public health here in BC threw the populace under the bus, as many doctors and researchers have now publicly determined.
Anywho, being openly Demisexual and Disabled gets you a lot of hate in small towns.
So, unbeknownst to me, since being vocal on twitter, somebody had filed a safety report against me. Trying to paint me as a danger to others! Me, a pacifist! Now, I’m not sure if this was small-town harassment and bullying, or ableism, or aphobia, or what, but imagine my surprise at coming into work on a Monday to be escorted into a private meeting out of the blue with my union representatives to be grilled for hours about my tweets preaching responsibility and public safety.
From the get-go, the school district was wise in avoiding assigning people who had previously intimidated and harassed me to the “investigation.” Hell, one of these new appointees would later commission a third party investigation to try and cover their own ass after all was said and done, because of how biased, inflammatory, and intimidating the process was.
Despite only working three days a week already since the alternate school harassment as per doctor’s orders, I was put on paid administrative leave, and barred from going to work. My teaching partner was left to pick up the pieces, and the students immediately started gossiping, creating all sorts of false and horrible rumors – that I was a sexual predator or some equally terrible thing.
See, that’s where a lot of people fucked up, and continue to fuck up, in that they don’t seem to understand that slander and libel are things you can get taken to court for, not that teenagers are smart or wise enough to know.
In general, slander is an oral defamatory statement. Libel is a written defamatory statement. And the ongoing damage to my reputation from both in that shitty small town… To my small business, my personal reputation, and my brand, means that in hindsight I should have aggressively taken people to court for spreading such lies and malicious rumors.
I still have people leaving libelous statements and false reviews on my writing resources and books. People are still spreading vicious false rumors about me being a pedophile or a criminal. I know who some of them are, and I’ve chosen to be the bigger creature and not take them to court for damages. Although I really should. Because as you can already guess the RCMP were equally useless when I went to them with concerns of somebody attacking me through libel and slander.
As this investigation under false pretences proceeded, for the next month and a half to two months, I was given abrupt notices of investigative meetings and inquisitions, often via some shitty text message from my useless union president of the time – the same one who told me repeatedly just to accept whatever crime they were trying to paint me with. I was staying at my ex-girlfriend’s place in another city, and this meant I would get some nebulous message at 8pm to be at the board office the next day in another town for 8am.
Talk about undue hardship!
In hindsight, I really should have taken both the BCTF, the local, AND the employer to court… Between the bad faith representation on the unions part, amongst so many other things.
During these meetings the assigned bureaucrats would literally Soviet-interrogation style, slide bad photocopies of my tweets across a table, and ask me to explain them again and again. My private business as a writer and content creator was scoured for anything that could be used against me to paint me in a negative light. My words were twisted, and despite clarifying a dozen times, arguments using warped interpretations of my words were slanderously applied again and again. My disabilities were interrogated and shit on as harmful or as making me unfit for duty.
I hired a lawyer at one point, who was equally as useless, unfortunately. Granted, she confirmed what I had already suspected about both the local union representation and the employer acting in bad faith.
I eventually grew tired of the continual intimidation and harassment tactics, and began building a case. I demanded to record these clandestine and sketchy meetings – and they abruptly stopped them and would suddenly only meet with me if I promised that I wasn’t recording. (Talk about a clue towards acting in bad faith, eh? When you’re afraid of a public record…)
About the time the superintendent got involved directly for the second time was when I started filing Human Rights Tribunal complaints again. Now, this horrendously toxic woman had mostly operated through proxy – directing her toadies as to the method of intimidation and harassment towards me. This woman was famous for her corruption, nepotism, and cronyism.
She has luckily for the general public since been “seconded to the ministry” (which is usually government babble for “disappeared” to hide the government and its various ministries from looking inept and corrupt.)
But imagine my surprise when we finally went to a board meeting with the school board’s lawyer present. Prior to this, the school board members had suspiciously and likely intentionally been kept in the dark for all of these events.
That’s when my jaw really dropped.
This woman was brazen enough to shit on my disabilities and try to paint me as unfit for duty and good decision making because of them. Full on ableism in front of the school board and their lawyer!
I realize in hindsight, I reeeeeeeally should have taken them to court, as the settlement would have been huge, even if the five to ten years of court were ugly.
At the end of it all, I was sent back to work and was slapped with a one day unpaid suspension, which went on my file. They clearly knew they had fucked up – if they had pushed any further discipline, I would have sought damages. I still have heard nothing from the actual regulation branch years later, which is sketchy AF.
After that, everything changed.
The job, which had slowly become miserable over the past decade, became unbearable.
The damage to my reputation was fucked beyond belief, as in a small town, my forced two and a half month absence was worsened by the fact that I was barred from talking about how the school board office had fucked me. I didn’t sign any NDA, yet being muzzled as a then-current employee meant I couldn’t clear my name – and the rumors only intensified.
The fiasco changed my entire experience, as now my entire life had suddenly been made miserable due to the slander and libel that were circulating around town about me. In one fell stroke, the school board office staff had destroyed my entire teaching reputation of ten years.
Behavioural issues from students got worse, relationships fragmented, and my colleagues who had been hauled in for the same clandestine interrogations about me grew distant.
Eventually, only two months into the next school year, I quit.
Now, am I still pissed?
You bet your ass I am.
Some of these corrupt bureaucrats are still working in the public school system, managing the lives of children. That alone is disgusting to me. That the corruption, nepotism, and cronyism of the British Columbia public education system is so steeped into the upper management of school districts is telling. That not only was there zero punishment for this shit – that many of these people have been ignored or even rewarded for harassing, bullying, intimidating, and discriminating against their staff.
But at some point you have to take a step back and ask yourself what your time is worth. Could I have spent another decade fighting them in court and tearing down the whole facade? Getting corrupt bureaucrats fired?
Sure could. Likely would have profited too.
But my mental health was damaged so horrifically and my disabilities triggered and aggravated so badly, that I knew I couldn’t. For my own sake. Justice and financial recompense for damages just wasn’t worth my personal health and well-being.
And that brings us to the crux of what my own personal experiences are about.
Public systems are often broken and mismanaged. Kept running off duct tape and the good will of overworked, overburdened employees.
Across the world, public education is often underfunded – used as a political tool, or straight up destroyed intentionally so conservative business interests can privatize public services and utilities.
Meanwhile, the teachers, support staff, and students of these public education systems are left to rot. In my time as a teacher, I witnessed Life Skills programs for special needs students be ripped out of existence, to force students into regular classrooms as a cost-cutting measure under the guise of “inclusion.” I watched aboriginal students be force-graduated whilst still illiterate and innumerate, all because upper school board office management wanted better graduation numbers for their own job profile. I watched nepotism, cronyism, and corruption gut good teachers from schools.
In my single last year of teaching in the public school system – at least 3-4 other colleagues either quit or moved.
And that’s what bugs me the most.
Because at the end of it all, I still believe in public education, as a force modifier to equalize the rich and the poor. Education alone is the one solution to most of our left/right divide in society right now, especially when classism is the single largest issue in our society.
There are lots of good-hearted people with positive intent. Most of whom want to be there to help kids grow and evolve into their best selves, with all the information they need to be successful. Many of my colleagues were fabulous educators with lots of skills and background knowledge.
But the attrition is getting real – educators are leaving at an enormous rate, due to shitty pay against inflation, constant disrespect, and overbearing and toxic administration.
And the only solution is to fund education adequately, pay employees fairly, and somehow purge all the useless upper and middle management that produces nothing of any real value, all while stealing and siphoning resources away from students and teachers.
As a society, fixing public education is easy.
Simply drill down to support and expand the ground-floor of education. Eliminate any political abuse of the education system. Increase funding! That’s mostly it. Pay teachers and support staff more, reduce class sizes, improve special education and classroom supports, the list goes on and on, and these solutions have all been known for DECADES!
Because at the end of the day, I’m tired of watching good people leave the system because they, like me, become so jaded and disillusioned with a broken structure.
But I’ve already gone long.
The public education system is fucked, but it’s not beyond fixing.
And we need to start somewhere.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
