All Over the Place: The LSC Candidate From Hell

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

We’re back in school for a couple of weeks and now it’s the first Local School Council meeting for the year. I’m not excited. Last meeting (I wasn’t there), the president of the council and one of the community reps resigned. The only thing of interest to me was: Who was still on the council?
    Some schools have tons of parent volunteers. Not us. We have one, maybe two volunteers helping during the school year. We even awarded money to the best parent volunteer of the year just to try to get more to help us out. It didn’t work. The playground used to be patrolled by a number of adults – mostly teacher aides – but we only have one now, so the assistant principal has to help each morning by doing outside duty. We asked for parents to help us there too, but no one really comes out.
    So what does all of this have to do with the LSC Candidate From Hell? She showed up, along with two other parents, to apply for a position. We have two teacher reps (I’m one of them) and two community reps, but only one parent rep (we need five more).
    I didn’t care about the other two parents. But the Parent From Hell? She was a totally different matter. How can we have a parent who believes with great fervor that it’s her right to make sure no one gets in the way when one of her children has a fight?
    I know.

I tried to break up a fight between her daughter and one of my students last year on the playground. It was impossible. She made sure her sons jumped in and she positioned herself and her cousin in such a way that they could push all of the rest of us adults out of the way.
    It should have been an easy fight to break up. The girls had equal fighting skills, but how could anyone break up a fight when it was really five against one – including two parents?
    The first time, I thought they had accidentally pushed me aside. The second time, it was too obvious to mistake. When the gym teacher yelled to the mother to quit pushing, I knew we were in for it. It took five adults to finally stop the fight, and three adults to restrain the loser, who wanted very badly to get a piece of everyone in that family.
    We didn’t call the police on the adults. Hindsight is not the nicest way to view the world.

A month later, this mother’s son attacked a child from behind who was being walked to the office because of another fight. The son hit the boy so hard in the back of his head, I saw visions of ambulances. It became my job to restrain the son, and I did. And what did he do with his free hand? He hit me. Not once, but several times, and when the police arrived, he cursed them out.
    His mother’s response to the entire incident? “Mr. Brownstein hurt my child by almost breaking his arm.” I wanted to do more than that, but I’m just a teacher and we restrain children – we don’t hurt them. Through the entire ordeal, I had just held one of his hands, leaving the other hand free.

Were there other incidents? Of course. The Mother From Hell caused lots of problems for lots of teachers. Her children could do no wrong. Ever.
    And here she was now to apply for a position on the Local School Council. No way. Not on my watch. And I told the council as much.
    But one of the community reps at the meeting told me she would have done what the Candidate From Hell did. “I teach my child to let no one hit him.” (She, too, is a mother from hell; a child of hers can do no wrong. She’s a community rep because her son no longer goes to our school; she transferred him, and now, whenever I see anyone from the other school, they complain to me about him.)
    But, I was told by another member of the LCS, “We need members, and this is one of the few applications we received.”
    I don’t care. Quantity over quality? We can wait for a better candidate. We owe it to our school, our students, and our parents.
    So, how did everything end? We’re to draw up a new by-law that explains to the LSC members how they should act and let them know they can be removed if they do not act in the proper manner. The vote: 5 to 1. The election: next month’s meeting. The vote: 5 to 0.
    So now, I’m thinking about due process and petty lawsuits and how this woman will manage to get seated on the council, and how legally we will have the hardest time getting rid of her.
    And so it goes.

Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.