Teacher Stealing Kids' Money

[Don Dresden]

February 28, 2013 · 6:27 am
Our Sick, Sick, Untrustworthy Schools


And you thought Hogwarts was dangerous…

. . . It would be hard to top the teacher who poured pencil shavings in the special ed student’s mouth (and who wasn’t fired), but I think the Linden, California gym teacher who was caught on video stealing money from her students’ backpacks gets the prize. She was caught when a suspicious student and aspiring Nancy Drew hid in a locker to see if she could solve a string of thefts, and recorded the teacher’s larceny on her phone. It gets worse: when she brought the video to the attention of the principal, he told her to destroy the evidence. Luckily, she had already sent the video to her father.

What has the student, Justine Betti, learned from this episode? She has learned that institutions often close ranks to protect their own, not those they are supposed to serve. If she had followed the principal’s directive, what would have happened then? As it is, the school is “investigating” and the thieving teacher has only been put on administrative leave. Justine knows now not to trust her teachers and administrators, at least I hope she does—especially if either the gym teacher or the conniving principal are still working there a month from now. (By the way, you readers who are constantly chiding me about my frequent failure to use the term “alleged,” news reports on this story routinely said that the video showed the teacher “allegedly stealing.” That’s nonsense. The video showed the teacher taking money from students’ backpacks. There was nothing alleged about it. It wasn’t alleged, it was recorded.)

Or, perhaps Justine has learned that the whole purpose of authority is to use it as an opportunity for enrichment. We shall see how corrupting this experience was, won’t we? . . .

Nice work by young Justine. How long before she has her thumbs and/or kneecaps broken in an "accident"?

I do kind of feel sorry for the guy who marries her, though. "I happen to know for a fact you were not working late at the office, you two-timing SOB..."