This is her first full year here.
kmamom--actually, links to some of your posts have been e-mailed back and forth among our board members! At first, it was really a case of liking her personally, but disagreeing with what she was doing at our school, implementing policies based on her own personal baggage as a teacher and bad experiences she had.
More and more I view her as completely incompetent and a pathological liar to boot. One of those liars who really believes what she's telling you as she tells you, but you know she's making it all up on the spot.
I believe she's aware of some of my conversations with our school board rep, probably via the superintendent. When I recently e-mailed the super about an issue, the reply was cc'ed to the principal. In recent weeks she has started to attempt to discredit me in a passive-agressive sort of way through subtle comments to others. Questioning a lack of response on something that the other person would have no idea she never even inquired about, remarking on a parent feeling out of the loop with the implication that this was my fault for not keeping them in the loop--that sort of thing. But that stuff is lowest on the totem pole compared to everything else going on.
It actually is the county school board that we've spoken with, our representative anyway. But on a very informal basis--a mention in an e-mail about other things, running into her around town. The hope was that she would prompt the superintendent to take action. We know that we're going to have to take it to the next level and are organizing to do that, gathering as much information as we can. But, like you said, we know it will get ugly once we do. We want to make it count.
We've been looking into requesting her records through the Freedom of Information Act to see what disciplinary action and prior work history would have been available to the superintendent in making this decision, but apparently our state considers this to be under exemption. So we're looking at other avenues via FOIA--whether or not we can get something useful out of it.
We are in a right-to-work state, so there is no union. I've been told by teachers in other counties that they should contact a certain education association, so I'm going to encourage them to do that. I think they all really thought at first that the superintendent was going to do something about it--she had called the principal down to her office several times and they were told that the super knew about deteriorating conditions. So I think they were sitting tight, expecting changes to come from all that. And then nothing. Fortunately they are beginning to realize that the powers-that-be know exactly what's going on and they still aren't doing anything about it. And they're starting to organize themselves. They have been documenting in detail from the beginning, just like we have. But everyone knows that the most likely way to force change is through the parents.
We've tried to keep our issues separate--they have their issues with her as a boss, we have our own issues as parents. We're trying to focus solely on our legitimate parent issues, but it's really their issues that make us lose sleep at night and give us the sense of urgency that we can't spend years in a letter-writing campaign.
I've been told by another administrator in the county that our instincts are probably right when we say we think she was moved to our school because we probably wouldn't do anything about it. We're generally passive because we're generally happy, have had no reason to be vocally complaining about anything. We love our school and our teachers. We've been told she was driven out of the last school by the parent group, so we know it can be done. We're still trying to find out the details of that and what would have been included in her record about it. I think what the superintendent and the school board are going to find is that famous phrase about awaking a sleeping giant is going to apply here. We're all willing to go out in a blaze of glory fighting to the end, but are trying to do our homework and take the most effective route and find out all our legal options.
Thanks for all the replies--we appreciate any advice.