Reflecting on My Time in Douglas

In the midst of having so much time to myself because of all that is going on in the world, I have had a chance to reflect on many things in my life.   Yesterday I was looking for something in a folder on my desktop.  In it I found a couple of documents that made me both angry and sad for many reasons.

When I went to Douglas from 2010-2015, I went there for the best of reasons.  The first and foremost was that I wanted to give my Aunt Teresa more time in Douglas.  I always said that was my first motive and it was.  She was 87 when I got there in 2010 and she wouldn't have been able to be alone much longer.  

I was also excited to be able to give back to the wonderful community that I grew up in as the superintendent.  I had never had any aspirations to be a superintendent and will always say that being an elementary principal was the best job in the world.  I did that for 21 years and this gave me a new and different opportunity.  I couldn't have picked a worse time (other than maybe right now) to be a superintendent.  It was during the worse cuts in education in my memory because of the great recession.

The first two years went very well and I really loved my job.  There was one community member who made my life hell but not right away.  I recently found some documents that I thought I destroyed.  The documents I found were from 2017--two years after I left Douglas.  I had to hire an attorney to write him a cease and desist letter.  He had sent letters to my fellow Governing Board members in Gilbert about me.  When I ran for the Board, he notified the teachers' association about what a horrible person I was.  I showed him--I won by a landslide.  

If I wrote all of the ridiculous and awful things he did, this post would be longer than probably allowed on Blogspot!

During those three years, I was constantly harassed by him.  I would get emails from him on holidays such as Christmas, Mother's Day, etc.  I think I counted one time and I had over 1100 emails that he sent calling me incompetent (that was one of the nicer things) and saying awful things about me.  I was a reader at St. Luke's at Saturday Night Mass.  At least twice a month I would get an email from him on Saturday evening using some of the gospel that I wrote and say how could I be so hypocritical.  Every Board meeting, he would do a call to the public at least once to trash me.  It was so stressful and so unwarranted.   I truly have never hated anyone in my life like I hated him.

The sad part is that he had been a teacher for many years in Douglas.  His file contained so many letters about inappropriate relationships with students.  I absolutely believe that he was a child predator and I always reminded myself that what he did to me I could handle because I was an adult.  I know for a fact that he was after students because he went after my sister, Judy, when she was in high school.  If he did what he did today, I believe he would have  been fired, lost his teaching certificate and probably been in jail. But times were different.  I also believe that when people get away with things for years, they become emboldened.

Seeing those documents kind of sent me into a tailspin for a few hours.  But I have to remember that I did what was right.  I am so glad that my career didn't end with that experience--it is still going on.

This awful man died two days after my aunt did in July, 2017.  He had a heart attack.  In all of my life, I have never, EVER been glad to have someone leave this earth.  However, I am so glad that he is no longer able to do the damage to so many people that he did through the years.  I survived and came out stronger.  Many of the young girls he abused probably can't say the same thing....  I pray for them and for the people who allowed him to get away with so much so many years.  Some of them are still in positions that in my opinion they shouldn't be.  They have to live with that and I don't!!