I was eating at a local restaurant, and this guy was standing at the front waiting to seat a friend of mine and me.
The guy standing at the podium to take orders was Mark Newell, the principal whom I had worked with (under?) at Hawthorne High School.
What was he doing at this local restaurant?
I asked his name, and yes, he told me his name was Mark.
Wow!
I never thought I would see this kind of justice in my lifetime.
Here's the culmination of the havoc that happened nearly three years ago:
Add to this what happened to the music teacher in 2009. He was brilliant, energetic, dedicated to doing the best for the students, many of whom had only a bleak future of poverty and gang violence to look forward to.
"Silencing Hawthorne's Music Man"
The music teacher behind all this is Donald Flaherty, a 45-year-old
with a Ph.D., a love of drum-and-bugle corps dating to his own Porterville High
School marching days, and a stubborn belief that urban kids can fight the
countervailing culture of drugs, guns and gangs to emerge as bona fide winners.
Flaherty was old-school, and that's what is needed in classrooms these days.
Flaherty introduced old-style discipline — push-ups for being late, or
kicking out kids who weren’t willing to play by the rules — with a steady diet
of affirmations to make street-hardened kids less afraid of success.
...
But this year (2009), citing “insubordination,” Centinela school-district
officials abruptly reassigned the beloved music teacher to oversee
music-appreciation classes, where no music is performed. His crime: Flaherty
failed for two years in a row to organize a marching band for Hawthorne High
School’s winless football team.
In other words, Flaherty was a good teacher. The administrators just wanted quiescence.
The bureaucrats who stripped him of his cherished role are ducking the
media. But the consensus from several people contacted by the Weekly is that
Flaherty particularly angered former associate principal Kathy Dragone, who
complained about his discipline and said he improperly kicked kids out of
class. Dragone had the ear of Centinela Valley Union High School District
Superintendent Jose Fernandez — and she has since been promoted to run the
district’s adult-education programs.
Fernandez eventually stabbed Deragone in the back and demoted her to a teaching job, and then she in turn went on stress leave. She also harmed me for what she had put me through, too.
This fall, the first day back from summer break, Hawthorne High School
Principal Mark Newell told Flaherty to immediately clear out all his “stuff” —
though he left behind many instruments he purchased so students can still play
— to make room for a new bandleader. Flaherty was so shattered he couldn’t
sleep, fought with fleeting thoughts of suicide — and immediately went on
stress-disability leave.
There's Mark Newell.
He had also hurt me when I was a long-term substitute teacher at Hawthorne High. Kids got away with rank abuse. It was unprecedented the amount of evil insubordination I and other teachers were expected to tolerate.
Newell babied and enabled students to be disrespectful, too. One of the counselors admitted to me how abusive and enabling Mark Newell had become.
His accomodationist ways eventually caught up with him
And now?
He's a waiter at a restaurant!
He sure didn't want to talk to me.
For some reason, while I had sat down to eat, he walked to the back and never came back!
Final Reflection
There is justice in our lives.
We have to trust that God who loves us, and is pained by injustice waged against us, will not rest to ensure that we are taken care of, and that the people who have done us wrong never get away with it.
Mark Newell was a bad principal, unprincipled, enabling, an obsequious administrator who was more interested in making nice and being liked by the bad kids who harassed teachers.
Now, he has to wait tables.
Vindicated!
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