Just off the grounds of Fairdale High School in Louisville, KY a makeshift banner has been hung in honor of 11th grade English teacher Jason Cooley. The banner reads simply: “Thank You”...
Mr. Cooley, 29, has been arrested and charged with one felony count of false public alarm for calling in a fake bomb threat at Fairdale High during a faculty meeting. Mr. Cooley is currently in federal custody with bond set at $10,000.
Sources attending the meeting all reported the same sequence of events, though all but one wished to remain anonymous.
The meeting began normally with the principal offering a hollow thank you to everybody for all their hard work.
Then came a number of announcements; though sources could not recall any of them. One teacher thought one of the announcements might have been about a future workshop on enhancement or compliance with “some damn thing or another.”
Tension seems to have begun rising in the room when a district representative announced to the faculty that as of the second semester all teachers would be required to use the same online gradebook, cobbled together with shitty district software. The 42-slide PowerPoint explaining the new online gradebook was allegedly legible neither on screen nor in the handouts.
Said one source, “These aren’t really ‘meetings’, you know? We don’t discuss and decide things. Teachers decide nothing. These are just gatherings where directives are handed down or we are subjected to inhumane and useless professional development ‘opportunities’….But that’s all normal. I think Jay
really started to lose it when the guy from downtown left and we had to get into groups…he always hates that shit.”
Teachers were asked to get into groups of four and write down one experience they had as a student with a teacher that impacted them profoundly in a positive way. They had 4 minutes to write. Then they were to share this experience with a partner at the table; three minutes each. Each table was then to choose a “scribe” to summarize all four stories on flip chart paper prior to a gallery walk. Cooley became increasingly agitated throughout the activity reports his ‘think-pair-share’ table partner, Amy Koltoff.
Says Koltoff, “Jay always hates this shit; like 92 percent of us. You just go along, swallow your dignity, smile and nod. That’s the code. But that day was different. When they told us that each table would have to act out one of our ‘special teaching moments’, he turned real pale. He dropped under the table and I thought he was going to be sick. Then I saw he had his cell phone out. Seven minutes later the building was evacuated. Jay is a hero.”
Speaking in a statement through his lawyer, Cooley said: “After three days, jail is still way better.”
http://teachbad.com/2010/12/28/teacher-fakes-bomb-threat-ends-faculty-meeting/
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