CMAE responds to radio program that used violence against teachers as comedy

Educators in Charlotte, and in surrounding school districts in North Carolina and South Carolina, recently heard a morning radio program use violence against teachers as a subject of comedy. In response to members’ concerns about the content of this broadcast, CMAE President Lawrence Brinson sent the following letter to the radio station’s local management in Charlotte and corporate owners in Florida.

Readers are encouraged to follow the links embedded in the letter to learn more about studies and reports on violence against teachers, and to share these with colleagues and co-workers.

October 4, 2019

Bill Schoening, Senior Vice President/Market Manager
WPEG-FM
1520 South Boulevard, Suite 300
Charlotte, North Carolina  28203

George G. Beasley, Chairman
Beasley Broadcast Group, Inc.
Beasley Media Group, LLC
3033 Riviera Drive, Suite 200
Naples, Florida  34103

Dear Mr. Schoening and Mr. Beasley,

On Friday, September 27, three co-hosts of your WPEG-FM morning program (“No Limit Larry and the Morning Maddhouse”) posed this “Question of the Day”: “If there was a teacher you could slap, who would you slap?” Iterations of the question were repeated through the morning’s three-hour program, including, “Who is the teacher that you had, now that you can, if you could, you’d smack the crap out of?”; “What teacher would you go back and slap?”; and, “Which one of your old teachers would you slap?”

On at least three separate occasions during the program, the co-hosts identified by name, and described in negative terms, four educators who had been their teachers. In one example, a co-host recalled a teacher who “wore big Coke-bottle glasses; I’d slap the glasses off his face.” These references may still be heard by listeners who download the podcast of that morning’s program. Your co-hosts urged listeners to post answers to the question on the co-hosts’ own Instagram pages and on Facebook, and/or to call WPEG-FM and leave a voicemail that might be aired during the show.

Your program’s subject matter came to my attention when educators in the listening area, some of whom heard the discussion as they traveled to work, shared their concerns with one another by email and through social media. At least one educator communicated her disappointment directly with one of the program’s co-hosts, and posted the co-host’s response online.

The response read, “I understand you may not have liked this segment but that doesn’t mean there aren’t teachers out there who also disrespect students or talk down on them and that could have a negative affect on that child. There are some GREAT teachers out there also but being that you’ve been in the educational system I know you’ve seen those types of teachers come and go. In the profession we’re in nothing is off limits. We’ve also received messages from people thanking us for bringing this topic up because they didn’t know how to bring up the fact the negative impact that teacher had on them or express it. While I do understand your frustration for every 1 teacher that was upset about it, there were 5 students saying thank you. I love the conversation it generated both positive & negative. Thank you for being one if those educators that’s actually helping our students and thank you for listening to the Maddhouse.”

For 25 years, I’ve taught high school students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Schools. I serve currently as president of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Association of Educators, and as a member of the North Carolina Association of Educators Board of Directors, representing Mecklenburg, Anson, Cabarrus, Gaston, Lincoln, Montgomery, Rowan, Stanly, and Union counties, plus Kannapolis and Mooresville city schools. All, or parts, of these counties and school districts are found within the WPEG-FM coverage area, which stretches nearly to Asheville, Boone, Greensboro, and Asheboro, in North Carolina. WPEG-FM’s programming can be heard by educators who live or work in Rock Hill, Greenville-Spartanburg, Columbia, and Florence, South Carolina. As the Charlotte Mecklenburg School District alone includes 19,000 employees, it’s safe to estimate that upwards of 100,000 educators and their families live in the coverage area.

Making this incident more troubling is the knowledge that many students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County region are familiar with the co-hosts, have seen them at in-person promotional events, listen to them regularly, and admire them.

On the same day this question was posed on your program, Yahoo News published a report titled, “Bite marks, bruises and dislocated shoulders: How America’s teachers are battling classroom violence.” It detailed examples of classroom teachers, teacher assistants, and other school district employees being assaulted, beaten, stabbed, even maimed and, in one example from South Carolina, left suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression.

Reporter Mahira Dayal wrote, “A 2018 government study on school crime and safety, compiled by agencies from various U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, found that 10 percent of public school teachers... have reported being threatened with injury by a student. Six percent, meanwhile, reported that they’d been physically attacked — higher than in almost all previous survey years.”

Dayal reported that, in another study, Ohio State University surveyed 3,403 K-12 teachers and found that 74 percent had been a victim of violence, “of those, 25 percent reported actual physical abuse or assault, 20 percent reported threats of physical violence, and 37 percent described verbal insults or sexual advances.”

In a report published by the National Education Association three months ago, Dr. Dorothy Espelage of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said that violence against teachers is a national crisis. That crisis has led educators in Connecticut to pursue, and win, new legislation to protect them from students. It has led teachers in Rhode Island to organize a sick-out to get the attention of legislators. The Oregon Education Association published “A Crisis of Disrupted Learning” earlier this year, describing conditions of violence against educators, and recommendations for addressing the problem.

Members of every profession face varied challenges. Our profession faces institutionalized disrespect in the form of restrictive salaries, benefits, and diminishing rights. We meet increasing demands for credentials, increasing expectations of services, and increasing class sizes, with fewer resources. Yet studies show that the overwhelming majority of educators spend their own money to meet classroom needs, and to meet students’ educational and personal needs. In the past week alone, we’ve seen stories in the media of one teacher donating a kidney for a student, and another teacher giving a student a home through adoption.

While we understand the need of morning radio programs to attract listeners in creative ways, we hope that you, your company, and your advertisers would condemn, publicly and in the plainest possible language, the suggestion that any teacher deserves to be “slapped,” “smacked,” or disparaged in the media.

We also hope that you would establish and publicize a corporate policy, even in a profession where “nothing is off limits,” that protects educators in your listening areas from proposals of violence by your on-air representatives. Your on-air representatives could begin by making clear that no educator deserves disrespect or victimization.

Finally, in light of the heroism demonstrated daily by classroom educators and school district employees in service to hundreds of thousands of students, and their families and communities, in WPEG-FM’s coverage area, we hope that your on-air representatives would spend an amount of time equal to the segments of September 27 to seek out and highlight the abundant examples in their coverage area, and to express appropriate sentiments of gratitude for that work.

As educators have shared their concerns with me about this matter, I intend to advise them of my correspondence to you, and I look forward to sharing with them your response.

Sincerely,
Lawrence Brinson,
Teacher, Phillip O. Berry Academy
President, Charlotte Mecklenburg Association of Educators
Director for District 3, North Carolina Association of Educators