Sperm Whale of a Problem

Protecting Classrooms from Predators Requires More People with Less Credentials

A state nutrition program called Harvest of the Month would supply our classrooms with seasonal fruits and vegetables like sweet potatoes, cabbage, kiwis, and butternut squash.

Its goal was to promote healthy eating. Our job as teachers was to utilize the provided fruit and vegetables in hands-on, nutritious eating and cooking lessons.

I barely can cook for myself, so I was pretty inept and unimaginative at this mandate.

Some of my colleagues, however, turned out to be Iron Chefs. I remember one teacher whipped up two different kinds of coleslaw from the cabbages sent to our classrooms—one vinegar-based, the other mayonnaise-based. He provided the kids with different tasting experiences as a way to develop their palettes and introduce them to what might not have been a new food but a new preparation. When he provided me with two tasting samples, he asked which I preferred. I said I liked them both, I couldn’t decide. He said that meant I had issues with commitment.

I always had a difficult time dreaming up curricular cooking ideas. Fruits were pretty straightforward. To convince the children to taste the blood oranges, I just sliced them up into quarter pieces, mentioned the word blood, and the kids were morbidly intrigued. Plus, they were already familiar with oranges as edible objects. Vegetables proved much more challenging.

Getting most kids to put anything near the mouths that was unidentifiable to them was nearly impossible. Whenever I tried to get them to taste squash, cashews, or yams they would seal their mouths shut, turn away, or shake their heads into an obstinate “nuh-uh.” Even when I exaggeratedly modeled how delicious the food could taste, they would rarely submit to a forced feeding. The only exception were my personal protein bars, which they often mistook for chocolate. They would hover around me as if I was eating birdseed, and they were starving pigeons hoping for some to fall from my hand.

All this to say that in 2012 when I read some of the details of the Miramonte Elementary molestation scandal, I have to admit I was initially a little skeptical especially of the repulsive details surrounding Mr. Berndt’s “tasting game.”

I realize we need to believe victims, especially when there are multiple students testifying to the exact same thing (or when there are photographs!), but the allegations were so grotesquely outrageous, it brought me back to the McMartin preschool case of the 80s and those spurious claims of Satanic witchery mixed in with preschool sex orgies (and cat sacrifices).

In essence, I questioned how this one old white man teacher had so much control over his classroom that he was able to get the kids to engage in and witness such despicable acts over the course of years.

What were his classroom management techniques?

I could barely get my kids to do their homework much less force them to taste a Harvest of the Month sugar snap pea with a dollop of ranch dressing on it.

Mr. Berndt, on the other hand, had been accused of spoon-feeding his students his own sperm.

Mr. Berndt was also accused of taping their mouths shut and placing African roaches on their bodies and faces! My first reaction was a retching blech, but then my second thought was a question, how did this man ever even pull this off, logistically? How demented and expertly conniving do you have to be to force a crowd of kids to engage in a conspiracy of their own debasement?

Sixty-one-year-old Mark Berndt was arrested after he developed film (who was still developing 35mm film in the 2010s?) that showed children blindfolded with tape over their mouths. A film developer at the CVS store alerted the police.

The lurid nature of the circumstances sent the school district into overkill and overdrive.

In an attempt to demonstrate measurable action (after the fact), they replaced the ENTIRE staff at the school from the administration to the teachers on down to the custodial staff. The District banned blindfolding across the district while also forbidding a particular teacher from executing a lesson on churning butter. She was feeding samples to her students spread on crackers which I guess some uppity-ups decided was too reminiscent of cum on a spoon.

I’m surprised The District didn’t ban licking vanilla frosting from fingers or sucking on popsicles, for that matter. Per usual, the reaction was all a little much.

After this scandal erupted, the sexual panic ramped up and the numbers of teachers placed in “teacher jail” exploded as any educator accused of any type of misconduct was removed immediately from the classroom and housed until an investigation was completed. I suspect the institutional freak-out cost the District millions of dollars in teacher pay, substitutes, and disruptions.

Mr. Berdt was eventually fired and convicted and the victims received financial settlements to the sum of $132 million dollars. Afterward, all teachers across the District were forced to take child abuse training twice a year instead of the usual once a year.

In reading about the scandal there was only one report I read that, to me, went to the heart of the matter.

Mr. Berndt should’ve never been left alone with children, especially after there were multiple complaints about him over the years.

In fact, no teacher should be left alone with children for the long stretches of time they are currently left unaccompanied and unaided.

Let me overemphasize my next point, for effect: TEACHERS NEED AND WANT ASSISTANCE.

Not iPads. Not more computers. Not more trainings or curriculum or A.I.. We need help. Extra pairs of hands and eyes and legs and other human adult brains in the classrooms with us.

Ideally, teachers should be supplied with a team of assistants, volunteers, co-teachers, supervisors, children of other ages, custodians, paraprofessionals, student teachers, mentees, and team partners. It is ridiculous and dangerous to leave teachers by themselves with a horde of children for hours on end, compartmentalized and siloed into private stalls, rarely provided consistent assistance or supervision.

But over the years, school districts have been regularly divesting in the human labor and capital that run the schools and opting instead for investments in technology or extra-trainings, looking for the cheapest, non-labor-dependent way to educate children. The most expensive cost in education after real estate will always be labor. That’s unavoidable, as it should be.

There used to be grandmothers working alongside teachers in classrooms.

There used to be many of these late-career women (older ladies, señoras, retired housewives with older children and extra time) working as classroom assistants, but then the No Child Left Behind law passed during the George W. Bush administration began over-regulating school personnel by legislating that Title I paraprofessionals needed to hold both a high school diploma AND two years of college (or an AA).

These onerous qualifications obviously disqualified many older women folk and other people who were skilled and talented enough to be classroom assistants already supervising, cleaning, teaching, and providing individualized attention to young children for many years prior to the law. They were not about to return to college for some credit that qualified them to do a job they had already been doing.

The pay and effort were not worthwhile for them to acquire these onerous certifications. Mandating every single educational worker to be a certified college-educated professional while at the same time only offering three or four hours of work a day excludes a host of competent and talented people from our classrooms.

In more ways than one, the law was a great disservice to public school students and teachers— but especially by leaving too many teachers alone with too many children for too many hours.