Date: Wed, January 8, 2003 7:00 pm
From: Stephanie Baldwin
Subject: Missouri teacher’s views on IRs
Dear Mr. Landrith
I’m writing to you to inform you about a racial incident at a Missouri school where a teacher made negative remarks about interracial dating. She also believes that there shouldn’t be any procreation across racial lines. She is a racist. That came on the heels of the Trent Lott controversy a month ago when he made statements supporting the positions of then-segregationist senator Strom Thurmond at a birthday party a month ago. Thankfully, he resigned from the majority leadership post.
Here’s part of the article and its link:
Crystal City teacher’s remarks on race prompt dismissal hearing
By Chris Carroll Of the Post-Dispatch
01/07/2003 12:00 AM
Jendra Loeffelman thinks it’s wrong for people of different races to date, marry and especially to have children.
Whether it was a firing offense for Loeffelman, 52, a teacher, to tell that opinion to an eighth-grade class at Crystal City Elementary School in Jefferson County was at the heart of a hearing that began Monday in the library at Crystal City High School.
Attorneys for both Loeffelman, of Bonne Terre, Mo., and the district agreed she made the statement on Oct. 23. She was suspended with pay the following day.
But the school district, in its bid to fire the tenured teacher, says she went much further, calling interracial children dirty and inferior. Several mixed-race children were present in her class.
“She basically said I shouldn’t have been born,” eighth-grader Billy Bingham told the Post-Dispatch after he testified in a closed portion of the hearing.
In more than a decade of teaching prior to the incident, administrators considered Loeffelman a “competent, effective teacher,” said Maurice Watson, attorney for the district.
Chuck Ford, the teacher’s attorney, told the Crystal City School Board his client was merely giving her opinion on a hot-button topic in response to a student’s question.
In cross-examination of district witnesses, Ford emphasized that rather than being a racist, his client was concerned that mixed-race children may be ostracized.
The most offensive remarks attributed to her were after-the-fact exaggerations by students and parents in the district,he said.
To fire her under the statutes the district was citing, Watson would have to prove Loeffelman willfully violated policies against race harassment. “How does answering a student’s question for a personal opinion (related to) an assignment from another class constitute racial harassment?” he asked.
Loeffelman’s termination hearing was scheduled to continue at 6 p.m. Tuesday
Link: www.stltoday.com
People in positions need to be careful with their tongue. It has damaged a lot of people in the past as well as present. People do take those things seriously and it hurts in the long run. Please take the time to read the article and put it on your website so that visitors to your website would get a chance to read it. Please, it’s urgent! She (Loffelmann) needs to be exposed to the public as a bigot.
Sincerely,
Stephanie Baldwin