Meet Dennis Brown. He was a former police officer in Georgia. He also was a principal in Carroll County Ga. and Hart County, Georgia.
First, let me make this perfectly clear. We have good, devoted teachers all across America BUT there are teachers who bully and some sexually assault kids.
What will putting a gun in their hand allow them to do? The bad apples can do more harm than imagination can develop.
Teachers are taught to teach. They are not armed guards or not trained to be sexual predators but they are out there just like the churches are. Do we trust the bad apples with a gun?
I heard many bad things about Brown so I started researching his background. I showed up at School Board meetings when he was trying to be a dictator regarding dress, hair, and self expression that was perfectly appropriate. One conservative and myself started a community organization called The Watchdog. I wrote about it on the Smirking Chimp back then. Pretty soon we had over 100 parents involved in calling the school board and the media was also in those meetings. The school board did eventually in Carroll County let him go, only for him to go to the neighboring county of Douglas and become a teacher where this happened not even a year after his uproar in Carroll County.
Former Lithia Teacher Gets 3 Years After Pleading Gulity to Sexual Assault
Dennis Keith Brown, 52, a former Lithia Springs High School teacher, plead guilty Wednesday to custodial sexual assault in exchange for a 15-year sentence, three of which will be served in prison.
Students at the high school had mixed reactions. Chelsea Wentworth said she noticed Brown behaving suspiciously.
"He always had his phone out and everything, and if you went up to his desk he'd hide everything. We weren't really surprised," Wentworth said.
She said the female student has been the subject of recent bullying.
Despite numerous red flags, school and district officials repeatedly missed opportunities to put a stop to Burgess' behavior. Time and again, these adults failed to investigate disturbing stories and reports of sexual abuse that arose throughout his career. Burgess has not been charged with a crime, and school officials won't say whether they ever notified law enforcement of his relationships with teenage girls.
That Burgess was able to repeatedly groom teenage girls for sex over two decades in the classroom is partly a reflection of how well-liked he was by administrators and students, something I wrestled with again and again. When I thought back to Rosemead and its campus culture, I remembered how boundaries between teachers and students were nearly nonexistent, with most of us content to look the other way. A nagging feeling of guilt occupied the back of my mind as I grappled with whether I'd been a part of a community that allowed troubling behavior to go unchecked.
I asked Diane Bladen, Rosemead High's principal until 2007, about these teachers, along with others known for inviting cheerleaders to sit on their lap between classes, attending prom with students who graduated the year before and reserving the front row for girls wearing skirts.
Burgess tells a colleague during a summer vacation that he can't wait to get back to Rosemead High, "Where I'm a God."
Another problem...Corporal punishment still exists…
Among the states that allow teachers to physically punish their students are the following: Wyoming, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Idaho, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Arkansas, Arizona and Alabama.
A commonality among many of these states is that corporal punishment is persistent in the South where Black students face discrimination from white educators, the report noted.
The leading state is Mississippi, where teachers are known to implement corporal punishment nearly 28,000 times a year.
“It would be an aggravated battery if you hit an adult with that paddle [and] the fact that she hit a little first-grader makes it even worse,” Attorney Brent Probinsky, who is representing a mother of a girl recently paddled in Florida, said. “It’s against the law to impose corporal punishment on prisoners. It’s against the law to impose corporal punishment on children in youth detention facilities. It’s against the law to impose corporal punishment on your cat or your dog or your horse, but you can do it to a little child. So it needs to end. It’s barbaric.”
In Florida, where corporal punishment is OK, many counties have prohibited the practice. However, that does not stop some teachers from hitting their students.
thehill.com/.…
I think arming teachers will stress the already stressed and underpaid teachers even more, and children are captive to their stress. Not only IMO, will the kids be afraid of a so called lone wolf active shooter, but afraid of a bad apple teacher.
I have not heard legislators bring this scenearo up when the Republicans yell Arm the Teachers. They should and if they don’t we should. This is precisely why I am writing this post.
I have family members and good friends who are educators and they too are concerned over this matter.
People are afraid to bring up what is uncomfortable but arming teachers will just add more trauma to not only the students but teachers. What about the bully in class who knows there is a gun in the classroom?
God Bless the good teachers out there. They are not trained for combat situations and they are trained to educate. Too many are doing things that are not in the educational realm. Yes, their answer is to arm the teachers but just like the good guy with a gun, who knows who the good teacher with a gun is? Until they aren’t. Cops are not suppose to shoot people and bully but many, too many do that can’t control their tempers, emotions, and are homophobic , racially motivated and having a bad day. They shoot or injure when their lives are not in danger. Except the recent outrage in Texas and they were not so anxious to shoot a mass killer...Why? He had a gun. They prefer their shooting victims to be unarmed.
What in the world are they asking from good educators because many are quitting over this outlandish proposition and what are they doing to our kids who are already afraid of speaking up without guns in the classroom.
Talk about a screwed up America. Banning books and arming teachers, May God help us.