Participants included MaryBeth Kubinski, Cynthia Hicks, Haven Blanks, Carleen Rummer, Khuanduen Toatley, Juanita Purdy, Jen Anderson, Tammy Hawk, and RoVirginette Tanner. The session was facilitated by Margueritta Brown.
Monday, October 7, 2019
Area teachers attend NCAE Region 3 NBCT Support Session
Participants included MaryBeth Kubinski, Cynthia Hicks, Haven Blanks, Carleen Rummer, Khuanduen Toatley, Juanita Purdy, Jen Anderson, Tammy Hawk, and RoVirginette Tanner. The session was facilitated by Margueritta Brown.
MaryBeth Kubinski: “Teachers are the leaders for every other profession”
I’m from Erie, Pennsylvania, where I majored in
Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Edinboro University.
After graduating, I moved to Charlotte and, for the next
11 years, taught kindergarten, first grade and second grade, and held several
leadership positions, at Albemarle Road Elementary School. During the same
period, I earned a master’s degree in Reading Education from the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte. Seven years ago, I transferred to Crown Point
Elementary and became an Academic and Intervention Facilitator, in addition to
teaching first grade and holding leadership positions. Now in my 19th year, I’m
a National Board Certified Teacher in Literacy, and I’m the Bus Safety teacher
for Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools. I have a wonderful and supportive husband,
Adam, along with two wonderful boys, Noah (12) and Alex (7).
Since I was three years old, I wanted to become a nurse
and a mom. While I was a senior in high school, my counselor told me I didn’t
have the math and science grades to become a nurse. My dreams were crushed! I
took a career survey and its results suggested I should be a teacher -- or a
nun. Ha! I didn’t want to do either.
So I went to college as an undecided major. However, all
of my new friends were in the education fields, and I decided to become a
teacher too. My mom told me I would be great at it. Thankfully, that quick
decision was the best decision for me. I discovered that I have a passion for
teaching, and I love seeing children’s eyes light up when they understand
something new.
Being the bus safety teacher has led me to learning
curves I did not know I had. I have to get a Commercial Driver’s License (so
intense). I now get to work with adults to help them become better drivers,
drive students home, and teach elementary students about bus safety. But when I
stop learning, it will be time for me to find a new profession.
I really love learning new things, and CMAE/NCAE has
provided me so many opportunities to do that.
Perhaps most valuably, CMAE has allowed me to form
lifelong relationships with other educators. I have met so many great people
who teach so many different things, and I believe it’s important to connect
with colleagues outside of the classroom. Thanks to CMAE and those
relationships, I’ve learned to speak in front of crowds, how to stand up for
what I believe in, and how to enjoy teaching despite all of the state and
district mandates.
I was always told that it’s important to belong to a
professional organization. I joined CMAE because I wanted insurance to protect
me in the event that something ever happened with a student or a parent. I
never imagined I would get so much more from it, but I’m reminded constantly
that teachers are the leaders for every other profession. For that reason
alone, we cannot give up on ourselves.
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
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
Stand with UAW workers in Charlotte
The Charlotte Observer published a report this morning on factors that led to the strike, now stretching into its fourth week.
CMAE President Lawrence Brinson encouraged CMAE members to stand with our union brothers and sisters in UAW, and to visit the strike line to show solidarity, whether for a few minutes or a few hours. Educators in South Carolina have already been scheduling visits.
Our friends appreciate snacks and drinks as well; while on strike, they collect about 20 percent of their normal wages in strike benefits. They intend to maintain the line until GM and UAW reach agreement.
For more information on the strike, visit www.aflcionc.org or call 919-833-6678.
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
CMAE invites members to bring issues, concerns to light for discussion with district superintendents
CMAE Vice President Margueritta Brown will represent CMAE
members at the October 23 meeting of the Superintendent-Teacher Advisory
Council (STAC). STAC meetings are designed to allow for discussion of issues of
concern with CMS Superintendent Earnest Winston. CMAE President Lawrence
Brinson will also attend the STAC meeting in his capacity as the High School
Representative from the Northwest Learning Community’s Advisory Council.
Members who would like to bring issues to light for
discussion, or to ask question of concern, are invited to use the “Contact CMAE”
portal in the right-hand column of the CMAE Bulletin to communicate those
topics with CMAE officers. When sharing issues or questions, be as specific as
you feel prudent.
Leslie Neilsen: “There’s power in numbers, and our voices and actions matter!”
I grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a small town outside
Boston. My career goal was always to be a teacher, despite my friends’ and
family’s many protests.
My studies began at the University of Vermont but life
took me in a different direction, and I left to begin working in the restaurant
business. I worked hard and became part of management. My role as a training
manager fed temporarily my desire to teach but I knew, in the long run, I
wanted to teach kids in a classroom.
Then an opportunity came to finish my studies at Boston
College while working full-time as a dining hall manager, and I jumped at it,
taking American Studies. Two professors -- Father James Weiss, who taught
theology, and Professor David Quigley, who taught history -- reinforced my
desire to be in the classroom. Because Professor Quigley made history
especially interesting, I took several of his courses, which set me on my path
to teaching social studies. I graduated in 2005, but the pull of teaching was
so strong that I returned for a master’s degree in secondary social studies.
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Educators are urged to complete the "ESSA" checklist
The checklist can be completed online, and its results will be used by CMAE to create an action plan and seek resources to meet pressing needs.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
A Letter from CMAE President Lawrence Brinson
September has been a busy month at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Association of Educators, and it followed a very busy summer. As we come to the end of our first full month of this school year, I’d like to take a “moment of personal privilege” to offer you an introduction.
Thanks to the support of voters in the spring election, for which I was and am extremely grateful, I became president of CMAE on July 1. On that date, I was already serving you as a delegate to the National Education Association Representative Assembly in Houston, Texas. That was followed immediately by the NCAE Summer Leaders Conference, the Instructional Leaders Institute, and the CMS Symposium. Between these events, I worked at our local office in Charlotte, and was called upon to attend meetings at state headquarters in Raleigh.
Just like you, I returned to full-time work in the classroom in August. But I’ve maintained a rigorous schedule of services to CMAE, working at the office and throughout the district, after school each day, and on most weekends.
Friday, September 20, 2019
CMAE introduces the "CMAE Bulletin"
Welcome.
In an effort to enhance communication with and between CMAE, educators, and parents in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, the leadership team at CMAE has established a new online presence: the CMAE Bulletin.
The key message that we want you to find here is this: CMAE, and the CMAE Bulletin, belongs to its members. It's meant to give you news, information, and resources that you'll find useful and timely. It's designed to allow you to share its content with your friends, colleagues, co-workers, whether by email or through your own social media platforms.
And we hope you'll take every opportunity to use it for communicating with us the important developments in your own career and worksite, the questions to which you need answers, and your suggestions for making it -- and all of our work -- better and more valuable to you.
We've spent the past few weeks developing the structure and content of our Bulletin, and we're pleased to bring it to your attention now.
In an effort to enhance communication with and between CMAE, educators, and parents in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, the leadership team at CMAE has established a new online presence: the CMAE Bulletin.
The key message that we want you to find here is this: CMAE, and the CMAE Bulletin, belongs to its members. It's meant to give you news, information, and resources that you'll find useful and timely. It's designed to allow you to share its content with your friends, colleagues, co-workers, whether by email or through your own social media platforms.
And we hope you'll take every opportunity to use it for communicating with us the important developments in your own career and worksite, the questions to which you need answers, and your suggestions for making it -- and all of our work -- better and more valuable to you.
We've spent the past few weeks developing the structure and content of our Bulletin, and we're pleased to bring it to your attention now.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Introducing: CMAE Vice President Margueritta Brown
Currently, I am in my 32nd year as a Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools educator. During those 32 years, I taught all subjects in grades three and five, and for three years I was a facilitator at Hornets Nest Elementary. For the past five years, I've taught third grade, and I love it!
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
CMAE President Lawrence Brinson urges educators to help eligible students register to vote
Almost every year, an election is scheduled for municipal, state, or federal offices. Just this month, citizens in the eastern half of North Carolina went to the polls to vote in two special Congressional elections.
In every election and election year, we hear candidates and office-holders explain all the reasons why that year's election is "the most important election in history." Certainly, all of them may be right, every time, since every election is important. People who are elected to serve in public office, at every level of government, hold and use tremendous authority to make changes that affect all of us.
Commissioner discusses referendum impacts with CMAE President Lawrence Brinson
 |
| CMAE President Lawrence Brinson met on Monday with Mecklenburg County Commissioner Susan B. Harden, whose district includes CMAE headquarters at 4523 Park Road, and Katherine Mooring, Senior Vice President for Community Investment of the Arts and Science Council of Charlotte. Harden and Mooring shared information on the referendum on funding for public education, parks and greenways, and arts and culture in Mecklenburg County. CMAE's leadership team will discuss impacts of the referendum this week. |
Friday, September 13, 2019
New and returning Association Representatives in NCAE District 3 receive training in Charlotte
 |
| New and returning educators comprise the 2019-2020 class of CMAE Association Representatives |
 |
| Tonya Pointer, Cotswold Elementary reading specialist, introduces herself |
Introducing: CMAE Secretary Lakisha Mills
Saturday, September 7, 2019
Friday, September 6, 2019
CMAE Government Relations Committee plans candidate interviews, Legislative Reception
CMAE's Government Relations Committee, including (from left) Linda Ingle, Anetha Perkins, Randolph Frierson, and CMAE President Lawrence Brinson, met on Thursday to discuss plans for interviewing candidates for municipal offices in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, and for its annual Legislative Reception.
Committee Chairman Frierson expects to announce details of the committee's decisions soon.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
CMAE sets Instructional Professional Development Academy dates
As part of its commitment to develop instructional leaders in school communities throughout the district, CMAE will sponsor opportunities for instructional professional development on seven dates during the 2019-20 school year. Modules will focus on college- and career-ready standards as a platform for Instructional Leadership Institute (ILI) graduates, members, and potential members to continue their leadership journeys.
All members are invited to participate, but seating is limited. Those interested in attending should register by calling CMAE at 980-370-1015.
Dates and modules will be offered as follows:
All members are invited to participate, but seating is limited. Those interested in attending should register by calling CMAE at 980-370-1015.
Dates and modules will be offered as follows:
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