Grosse Pointe teacher roasts board of education in intense resignation speech

sean mccarrell i'm a teacher over at north and i live down in the park last year i participated in a professional development session during our november pd day offered by beaumont we were strongly encouraged to go the topic was how to triage after the event of a school shooting during that session i learned and even practiced on a dummy how to pack a bullet wound and apply a tourniquet to prevent blood loss in our students i also to my horror learned that if my students were to get shot in the chest i should leave them for dead and assist those who had a better chance of survival now i find it interesting the district sponsored that for us and trusts us the teachers who have no medical training in any capacity to be the first responders to our students medical needs in the event of a school tragedy trust us to literally choose and decide who would live and die while you don't even trust us with the educational decisions that are in the best interest of our students the thing that we've been hired to do the teachers in this district are experts experts in education we've been highly trained through advanced degrees and years of experience to make the best educational decisions for our students i have 10 years of experience two postgraduate degrees in education i'm a licensed k-12 administrator and a district level department chair i'm more qualified to make educational decisions for our students except for one person everybody here has less experience or actual knowledge of what life is like in our classrooms like you've done to my colleagues you've disregarded my experience my professionalism and my expertise and reality and substituted it with your fantasies you're listening to them they don't know what happens in our classrooms they're not there and neither are you you sit up on this stage which by the way i hope you enjoy the space you have here this does not exist in our classroom and you tell us after your meetings that you so appreciate and respect us well i cry you don't respect us if you respected us you'd listen to us you don't appreciate us if you did you wouldn't make our jobs literally impossible to do if you cared you would pretend that you're listening at least i sent you an email months ago expressing my concern about our full face-to-face return and i didn't get a single response from any of you not one not even a message received i helped get many of you elected to this board and you couldn't even be bothered to hit reply if you actually respected me my colleagues you prove it with your actions instead you'll make your vote tonight basically a foregone conclusion because you're trying to ram it through in a single meeting and then you'll get to the end of the meeting where you say that you do respect us last time we were here john told you that teachers were angry you could probably tell that that was true he said though that it wasn't about the uh any decisions at the board level it was the situation we're not angry about the situation we can't control covet we're angry at you we are angry at you and angry is a nice way of putting it you've done more damage to our students our district and our profession in the last 12 months than we've seen in the last decade keep going down this path and i'll be surprised if our number one teachers even stick around i know i'm not i submitted my resignation to 389 last week and i'm looking forward to doing something that's going to be valued and appreciated not lied to and belittled listen to your teachers we're number one in spite of this board not because of it if you trust us to plug a bullet wound you should trust us with that that's three minutes how many teachers need to leave before you start to listen

Channel: Click On Detroit | Local 4 | WDIV

Views: 4,765,816

Keywords: Board of Education, Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Public Schools, Metro Detroit

Id: mJBlgIA3K24

Length: 3min 17sec (197 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021