By Jason S. Martin
In a recent full-page ad, Loveland Classical School leaders joined other charter and private school leadership in portraying themselves as reasonable, well-meaning leaders. Unfortunately, their past actions indicate an organization more focused on the political scoreboard than on the best interests of the community. For years now, the administration and board of Loveland Classical Schools have been abdicating their responsibility of running a public charter school in order to assume the role of a political action committee. I know because I taught there for five years and watched in disappointment as leadership chose politics over education.
What I can share with you is that before my time as an educator at LCS’ Lyceum (elementary) campus, I had never encountered such a politicized and divisive organization. During a board of directors/staff meeting in 2018, school leaders literally stated that we need to “hunker down” because Democrats earned a trifecta in state government. I had to write Mrs. Barnes and Mr. Stout to explain that people of all political persuasions work to make LCS a champion in academics and the growth of whole students. The following year, and at the request of right-wing parents roaming the halls, the administration sent out emails to teachers who were not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, demanding they comply and infringing on First Amendment rights. This is just another instance where I had to communicate out and ask for clarification of basic law in a public school.
At the beginning of the 2020 school year, I was censured by the administration for being “oppositional” when I raised criticisms, offered suggestions, and expressed how dishonored some educators at LCS felt. I was ostracized, my speech was restricted, and I was reported on secretly by other staff. That’s not leadership, that’s creating an authoritarian space of confusion and control. I resigned from LCS having been alienated and shut up in the very place I practiced my passion and loved. LCS lost a few excellent and effective established teachers and coordinators this past year alone based on the path that “leadership” is taking the school down. School leaders like Mr. Stout and board members like Mrs. Barnes are so blinded by making political points and appeasing extremists that the school is crumbling. The right-wing loves to portray neighborhood public schools as the brainwashing centers of communities, but everything I’ve witnessed and keep witnessing says the opposite. There are suitable reasons why even the children of the founders of LCS don’t attend the school anymore. The reasons for their departure may not be so political, but current LCS leadership has successfully removed the original heart of the school to satisfy the reactionary urges of a faction within.
If charter schools want to continue to be divisive and don’t want to cooperate with what the greater community needs, they should become private and stop taking tax dollars from the very families they’re supposed to protect and serve. I can promise that educators and our students outside of the charter/private realm are sick and tired of masks, too, but at least our schools can claim the virtue of serving our students and communities honorably and compassionately. I don’t understand how LCS can say that they’re building excellent community stewards when they are the exemplars of alienation, authoritarianism, and the abandonment of reason when it can help the community most.
More transparency and accountability to the community from rogue “schools” like Loveland Classical is critical, now more than ever. I would be hard-pressed to call any of the signatories (from LCS at least) “educational leaders”; it’s unwise to use that term. A dear friend of mine (and current LCS employee) is at home with COVID right now, suffering unwelcome consequences and worrying about the future impact on their body. I can say that real leaders would have cared enough to enforce guidelines and preserve the school’s whole health the best they could, instead of throwing a tantrum in the local papers. Real schools are invested in having all of their community be the healthiest whole people they can be, and LCS can either return to being a school or return public money and walk down this self-destructive path alone.
Jason S. Martin is currently attending UNC working toward a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education and was a 2019 Thompson School District Educator of the Year Nominee.
