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Opinion: Discipline “is the hardest part of teaching”

My name is Dave Brown I attended the last school board meeting. I would like to say for me discipline is the hardest part of teaching. If you can ask ten teachers, principals or superintendents they will give you a different answer of how to handle the students. The best school in this area for discipline is the High School in Hampton. They have a Court Liaison Officer right in the school. He is good at his job. As a substitute teacher there I know what is expected of me and what I need to do in the classroom. They have a discipline policy and they follow it. If I tell the office I am having problems with a student I get support from the office. I have been in schools where I turn a student in to the office and they tell me I am not handling the student right.

Mason City is not the only school that bases their discipline on who your parents are. People in town have told me this has gone on for decades in Mason City. Clear Lake is known to do this also. There are other schools in the area that do it also. I have worked in a school (Clear Lake High School) where the seniors had been telling the principal to F off to his face since the students were juniors. I have worked in schools where the principal and superintendent were afraid of the parents. The High School Disciplinarian is the hardest job in the school system in my opinion.

When the meeting was over I asked Barb (principal at Hoover) if she was getting air conditioning in Hoover. She said they were. Then she says I didn’t get a contract in teaching this year. She said something about sometimes you have to move. I took it as a wise guy comment. Why do you think she felt the need to say that? I tried being nice to her and she comes back with a wise guy comment.

Maybe the new superintendent should get some different principals in the schools. Especially the ones the past superintendent hired.

Mason City expects substitute teachers to walk into a building and classroom and know exactly what to do. I am assuming the new superintendent is going too held to that standard. He shouldn’t need any help in doing his job. If he does maybe the school board should get rid of him.

I would also like to remind the school board that Scott Warren made a threatening remark directed at my family in the administration room approximately three years and four months ago. I think he should be removed from the School Board. It’s probably an ethics violation.

Dave Brown
Mason City, Iowa


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