ACT III at BoE

The Board of Education meeting that Sapuro Rayphand, James Yangetmai, and I attended, for which Mr. Ambrose Bennett accused us of attending “to collect anything they could use to shoot me in the news” in his letter to the editor Friday, Sept. 17, 2005, was in fact a meeting we could attend only because school was out still under threat by Typhoon Nabi. BoE meetings are normally held during school hours. We had been informed that the Board had formulated a response to Mr. Bennett’s last list of “demands” to the Board. We had publicly declared our interest in effective teachers representation in the board. By all indications, we were not getting any. We registered our presence at the BoE. Unfortunately, Mr. Bennett tried and failed to play to the audience.

The late German Theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, “there is something in the misfortune of even our best friends that does not displease us.” Dealing with the Pauline scriptural verse that “sin abounds but grace much more abounds,” Tillich was commenting on the pervasiveness of “sin,” the ordinary reality of human depravity.

In the same vein, under the sense that “grace much more abounds,” I would have added that “there is something in the discomfort even of our worst enemy that does not please us.” This was existentially my state of being as I squirmed in my seat through the aforementioned BoE meeting where one officer after the other, BoE members and the Commissioner herself, expressed exasperation at Mr. Bennett’s seeming ill-preparedness to come to the corporate table and work creatively with the board. What struck me as tragic was the observation that while I was empathetic toward Ambrose’s embarrassing predicament, he appeared not to have the slightest idea nor the grave concern over the dressing down he was receiving from his colleagues!

The matter of teachers’ tenure, for instance, was raised again by Mr. Bennett, only to be reminded that the board had already asked him previously to write a cogent rationale for his concern, articulate a proposal, and present a workable model for the board’s consideration. Instead, the board felt pestered with the endless demand that Mr. Bennett be recognized as the “collective bargaining” agent for the teachers, and that the board would have to negotiate teachers’ tenure terms and benefits with him, a preposterous suggestion that was properly and rightfully shot down.

It is, of course, a measure of Mr. Bennett’s vanity to think that we would expend valuable free time and emotional energy to snoop over his affairs so that we could pull him down. Scott Norman publicly called the behavior “paranoid.” Street smart lingo has another word for it but minors read this column so I will not subject them to urban gutter crudity.

SVES fifth grade teacher Betty Miller was livid when she read in the papers Mr. Bennett’s alleged response to the special election petition she signed. She felt that Bennett’s insinuation that those who signed the petition were but lackeys to BoE member H. T. Guerrero’s manipulation was an affront to teacher’s integrity. The 200-plus teachers like her who signed the petition “thoughtfully did so,” she said, with even some expressing fear that Mr. Bennett would do their career harm for signing their names. “If the Governor wants to hear from the frontlines,” she added, “he only has to call me or any other teacher at SVES. We’ll tell him what we think.”

Mr. Bennett’s dismissive comment of ACT 3 (Rayphand, Yangetmai and Vergara)—”Yet the most this group could ever hope to accomplish is to get another election that I would be favored to win again anyway,”—may be bravado in his mind, but it appears more to be a spastic convulsion of a specie under threat of extinction. If the foregoing be the case, what then is Mr. Bennett afraid of with another election?

Though some more teachers’ signatures had been added to the 210 on file, the matter of a special election is in the hands of the Governor. He had already asked the BoE previously to hold a special election, but the Teachers’ Rep is his appointee, and BoE appropriately declined his suggestion. The Governor’s vaunted decisiveness will, of course, be tarnished if he waffles on this matter before the November election. But as Ms. Lisa Black of Hopwood wisely counseled us in an earlier email exchange, we would not want to put all our eggs into the Executive basket!

The Association of Commonwealth Teachers is in the process of soliciting active members to its ranks in an effort to broaden the range of perspectives articulated from the public schools’ teaching profession. It is our goal to see that teachers themselves initiate the means that would meet their own requirements. Dependence on a single Messiah to work on our behalf is at best, quixotic; at worst, suicidal. Putting a system in place so that dynamic discourse among our ranks can happen is the order of the day. Power is in the middle of the table waiting for anyone to wield it. The BoE is not remiss to accept any proposals affecting teachers’ well-being from any sector. They welcome active and creative teachers’ participation, sadly, a service Mr. Bennett had not been able to provide.

In the classic Aristotelian model of the three-act play, the dramatic three Acts follow a set-up confrontation-resolution pattern. Plot point 1 introduces the situation, and point 2 is played out past conflict definition at midpoint toward the resolving catharsis that constitutes Act III. The tragi-comic drama being played out at BoE has gone past Act III. Not the triumvirate A.C.T. 3, but Act III—the incontrovertible fact that Mr. Bennett has been reduced to laughable impotence and absolute irrelevance in the BoE. Life mercifully provides its own judgment and mercy, its own accountability and absolution. Time for teachers to let the curtain fall, for reality itself has done so. ACT is moving on.

(Strictly a personal view. Vergara writes a weekly column for the Saipan Tribune.)