On Thursday, the Colorado State Board of Education decided that Jay Bennish’s classroom outburst was more important than the state’s No Child Left Behind plan. Bennish’s political speech to a geography class at Overland High School was also more important than teacher training or helping school kids with asthma.
But in the most ironic twist, the State Board of Education let Bennish’s ridiculous, yet legal, comparison of Adolf Hitler to President Bush take precedence over disciplining teachers who may have committed crimes. That was the final absurdity of a meeting that imploded after former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer couldn’t get a resolution slamming Bennish added to the agenda.
The party-line split among eight board members found four Democrats blocking four Republicans from adding Schaffer’s resolution. The Republicans responded by promising to block consideration of 20 items on the existing agenda.
Board chairwoman Pamela Jo Suckla finally cried “uncle.” She used parliamentary power to adjourn the meeting early. She said she didn’t want to make the board look any more idiotic.
Except Suckla then signed a letter nearly identical to Schaffer’s resolution.
So today, Coloradans have no action on eight disciplined teachers or a No Child Left Behind plan or “alternative principal” training at Western State College or a “gifted education specialist” program at the University of Northern Colorado.
What they have is an ugly precedent.
For the record, Schaffer, Suckla, Randy DeHoff and Peggy Littleton think Bennish “perpetrated upon his students an extreme form of economic, cultural, political and religious bias and intolerance.”
For the record, they also fed a media circus and violated their own procedure for teacher misbehavior. Board member Rico Munn, who opposed adding Schaffer’s resolution, summed up the hypocrisy: “In the past week, we’ve seen on the news an accusation of a teacher taping a student to a bench. We’ve seen a teacher accused of racially discriminatory practices in Highlands Ranch. In my mind those acts, if true, are equivalent to or even worse than the acts of Mr. Bennish. But we do not see a resolution before us about those individual teachers, because that is not what the State Board of Education does.”
Schaffer defended his unique resolution in the opposite way you would think.
“I presume we’re eventually going to rescind the gym teacher’s license (in the taping incident),” Schaffer told me.
The Cherry Creek School District, where Bennish works, “may move him,” said Schaffer. “They may try to put some parameters on it. Who knows what they will do. I rather doubt licensure will be an issue.”
In other words, for what Schaffer himself believes is a non-firing offense, he and his GOP colleagues wanted to enact an apparently unprecedented ed-board censure. Worse, they meant to do it before the Cherry Creek School District has had a chance to act on Bennish’s case.
That’ll play well with a jury.
Cherry Creek officials are supposed to announce today what they will do to Bennish, who was recorded ranting against capitalism and Bush by a student who then turned the recording over to a columnist and talk radio.
Bennish deserves punishment. He crossed a line, especially in geography class. Hopefully, Bennish now understands he should referee, not play, in classroom debates. Hopefully, he now sees that while global warming or drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be fodder for class, der Führer is not.
That said, you’ve got to wonder why the student who recorded Bennish and his parents took the recording to talk radio before the Overland principal or the Cherry Creek superintendent. That’s the same cart-horse approach that Schaffer wanted the board to take Thursday.
“The Jay Bennish School of Socialism” is what Overland High School will become “unless they deal with this prudently,” Schaffer proclaimed.
His hyperbole echoed the very unjustified comparison he castigated.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
