$5 to Help Abandoned Teacher Get Home to His Wife
Donation protected
Hello, my name is Jimmy McKinney and I'm a former 4th grade teacher currently stranded in Belgium trying to make it back to my wife who lives in the US. During one of the last remaining days of Teacher Appreciation Week, I wanted to take a moment to inform you of the realities of education. Here is the full length and incredibly long-winded explanation of my story and why I'm asking for $5,000: https://youtu.be/TrbQcZccGuw
Honestly, more than the money I want to bring attention to a real issue in education. Donating only $5 (GoFundMe has a $5 minimum) to my cause can help me get my story out there. And only $5 to my cause will significantly reduce my stress as I try to make it through my final days here alone in Belgium before I return to be with my beautiful bride who I just married this past April (just barely since my situation was up in the air).
The generous donations will help recoup the money I lost and will continue to lose from booking my own flight and shipping, selling, or trashing all of my belongings as the US government will no longer pay for it. It will help me pay for this last month of rent for the house that was originally being paid for with my housing allowance and is now draining my savings. It will help me cover my rental car since my license plates were removed and I have been denied access to the base, even though my perfectly functional car is sitting on it. And it will help me cover potential legal fees I'll need to pay as I try to protect myself future retaliation and draining of my accounts from DoDEA as the statute of limitations on debt collections have been removed, allowing DoDEA to even claim that employees who are 5+ years into retirement all of a sudden owe $10,000. I'm sure I'll get it even worse than other employees though because of my constant outspokenness about the abuses of the organization that is directed by a former superintendent of Providence Rhode Island Schools that actually ended up firing all 1,926 of their employees at one point due to his poor leadership.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to highlight an author who I discovered only after I began having my own issues with DoDEA. Someone told me about her book, "Autobiography of an American Teacher" and it highlights abuses far more horrible than I had even received. Unlike D.J. Wright, I was never forced to teach in a classroom leaking chemical fumes that caused me and my students to vomit, even vomiting blood at times. I was never subjected to repeated sexual harassment or some of the other horror stories she faced. But I want to add my own testimony as another witness to the fraud and abuses that occur not only within DoDEA, but across the American education landscape. Here is her book that is definitely worth a read:
However, to put my story simply I was working at what I thought was my dream job, teaching at a DoDEA school in Belgium. I loved my job. I loved my students. I loved the other teachers. And I even loved my administration. I think my administration seemed to like me too.
That all changed however this past February when I began experiencing retaliation after I tried justifying my seating arrangement using academic research and video evidence of my students collaborating. When I had presented the academic research, my asst. principal simply said, "Yale is a good school... but... you still need to put your seats in a collaborative arrangement." On top of that more and more work kept being added to my workload, but I was already swamped with not only teaching 4th grade, but also as the 4th grade team leader and the 4th grade robotics club leader. Additionally, I was enrolled in Johns Hopkins and I was planning for a wedding (multiple actually since that didn't go as smoothly as I and my wife had wanted either). As a result I was only getting 4-hours of sleep a night, which I had already mentioned to my administrators. But because they are out of touch with real teachers, they don't understand the amount of extra time it takes to complete every additional task they add to our workload.
After a little while I was called in for a pre-action investigation (a preliminary measure for termination) where I was questioned as to why I never responded to their emails. Ironically, my principal later on emailed me back and forth for 3-hours straight telling me that I should stop emailing, even though all my emails were only responses to hers and I was just investigated for not responding to emails. That principal also said, "Mr. McKinney, but research can be used to prove anything..." as if that was a reason to ignore academic research. And what kind of message was that sending when I was supposed to be requiring my own students to cite their evidence.
Things continued to grow more heated and eventually I was threatened with legal action after allowing my students to record themselves as a classroom management technique that would allow them to hold themselves accountable. I was told that I had not received proper consent forms, yet this same principal posts photos of these children publicly on a daily basis whereas these videos were private and were actually going to be deleted. Plus she should've known I allowed students to record videos since I had been allowing it since the beginning of school as a way for students to monitor their own ESL speaking progress. The parents all knew as well since I would often share the photos and videos with them when I had the time to do so.
After alerting other people that they might experience similar retaliation, I had my student gmail password changed, my key fob removed, and I was given 15 minutes to exit the building. I was placed on administrative leave immediately. I could no longer contact the parents of my students but I posted on a Facebook page related to the community that I was placed on administrative leave but here is my email address if you would like to contact me. Many parents and even just community members who were curious reached out to me to understand the situation. I let them know and then I started to hear other complaints from other parents in the community about the school.
Then the next day I was told I would be terminated. I tried reaching out to several different people to protect myself including the equal employment opportunity office, the inspector general, the military police, the base commander, the military attorneys, etc. yet everyone either said that it wasn't relevant to their department or acted incredibly suspiciously.
Then that weekend I bumped into two students on one of the bases and they asked me why I quit. I said that I didn't quit and that I was actually fired. They proceeded to tell me how they saw several girls in the class cry for the first time ever on the day our principal lied to the students in my class by telling them that I quit. Because many of them wanted to have closure and still see me, we arranged a last-minute covert farewell party. I've included the photo as evidence but I've covered all of their faces because of potential for retaliation. The teachers that came to my farewell party are not even featured at all because they were even more fearful of retaliation than these parents and students.
I also received these letters from a couple of my students that same day.
And another student who couldn't make it to the party had shared his thoughts with me through a class website we had used during my time as their teacher, where the students would practice writing to only other members of their class through a secure platform that required a student gmail account for sign-in.
Well as I continued to be vocal about the things that were happening to me and other teachers, I then began experiencing retaliation in forms that other teachers and military service members had never even heard of before. I was abandoned in the country and they refused to give me orders. I was left in the country without pay, without a housing allowance, without my military IDs, without access to base, without my license plates, without rights to ship my belongings home, and without rights to having a flight back. People have told me to claim abandonment and contact the embassy or JAG, but neither one could help. The embassy said to call JAG and JAG said they couldn't help me without ID (their original story was they couldn't help me as it was an employment issue). I don't know who to trust around here, but I do not want to stop being vocal about clear issues I'm noticing in education. I don't need tons of your money, but $5 in support will make a huge difference not only for helping me get home, but for helping get my story heard. More people need to be woken up about the realities of our US public education system, but that will not happen until more teachers, parents, and students begin speaking out about the real issues. Teachers not getting paid well enough is awful, but not the biggest issue. We have a high degree of nepotism and corruption in our systems, so even just choosing to support my cause by spreading my message will do wonders for our students, who are the biggest victims of what has now become our for-profit public education system. Thank you again and I appreciate you!
Honestly, more than the money I want to bring attention to a real issue in education. Donating only $5 (GoFundMe has a $5 minimum) to my cause can help me get my story out there. And only $5 to my cause will significantly reduce my stress as I try to make it through my final days here alone in Belgium before I return to be with my beautiful bride who I just married this past April (just barely since my situation was up in the air).
The generous donations will help recoup the money I lost and will continue to lose from booking my own flight and shipping, selling, or trashing all of my belongings as the US government will no longer pay for it. It will help me pay for this last month of rent for the house that was originally being paid for with my housing allowance and is now draining my savings. It will help me cover my rental car since my license plates were removed and I have been denied access to the base, even though my perfectly functional car is sitting on it. And it will help me cover potential legal fees I'll need to pay as I try to protect myself future retaliation and draining of my accounts from DoDEA as the statute of limitations on debt collections have been removed, allowing DoDEA to even claim that employees who are 5+ years into retirement all of a sudden owe $10,000. I'm sure I'll get it even worse than other employees though because of my constant outspokenness about the abuses of the organization that is directed by a former superintendent of Providence Rhode Island Schools that actually ended up firing all 1,926 of their employees at one point due to his poor leadership.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to highlight an author who I discovered only after I began having my own issues with DoDEA. Someone told me about her book, "Autobiography of an American Teacher" and it highlights abuses far more horrible than I had even received. Unlike D.J. Wright, I was never forced to teach in a classroom leaking chemical fumes that caused me and my students to vomit, even vomiting blood at times. I was never subjected to repeated sexual harassment or some of the other horror stories she faced. But I want to add my own testimony as another witness to the fraud and abuses that occur not only within DoDEA, but across the American education landscape. Here is her book that is definitely worth a read:
However, to put my story simply I was working at what I thought was my dream job, teaching at a DoDEA school in Belgium. I loved my job. I loved my students. I loved the other teachers. And I even loved my administration. I think my administration seemed to like me too.
That all changed however this past February when I began experiencing retaliation after I tried justifying my seating arrangement using academic research and video evidence of my students collaborating. When I had presented the academic research, my asst. principal simply said, "Yale is a good school... but... you still need to put your seats in a collaborative arrangement." On top of that more and more work kept being added to my workload, but I was already swamped with not only teaching 4th grade, but also as the 4th grade team leader and the 4th grade robotics club leader. Additionally, I was enrolled in Johns Hopkins and I was planning for a wedding (multiple actually since that didn't go as smoothly as I and my wife had wanted either). As a result I was only getting 4-hours of sleep a night, which I had already mentioned to my administrators. But because they are out of touch with real teachers, they don't understand the amount of extra time it takes to complete every additional task they add to our workload.
After a little while I was called in for a pre-action investigation (a preliminary measure for termination) where I was questioned as to why I never responded to their emails. Ironically, my principal later on emailed me back and forth for 3-hours straight telling me that I should stop emailing, even though all my emails were only responses to hers and I was just investigated for not responding to emails. That principal also said, "Mr. McKinney, but research can be used to prove anything..." as if that was a reason to ignore academic research. And what kind of message was that sending when I was supposed to be requiring my own students to cite their evidence.
Things continued to grow more heated and eventually I was threatened with legal action after allowing my students to record themselves as a classroom management technique that would allow them to hold themselves accountable. I was told that I had not received proper consent forms, yet this same principal posts photos of these children publicly on a daily basis whereas these videos were private and were actually going to be deleted. Plus she should've known I allowed students to record videos since I had been allowing it since the beginning of school as a way for students to monitor their own ESL speaking progress. The parents all knew as well since I would often share the photos and videos with them when I had the time to do so.
After alerting other people that they might experience similar retaliation, I had my student gmail password changed, my key fob removed, and I was given 15 minutes to exit the building. I was placed on administrative leave immediately. I could no longer contact the parents of my students but I posted on a Facebook page related to the community that I was placed on administrative leave but here is my email address if you would like to contact me. Many parents and even just community members who were curious reached out to me to understand the situation. I let them know and then I started to hear other complaints from other parents in the community about the school.
Then the next day I was told I would be terminated. I tried reaching out to several different people to protect myself including the equal employment opportunity office, the inspector general, the military police, the base commander, the military attorneys, etc. yet everyone either said that it wasn't relevant to their department or acted incredibly suspiciously.
Then that weekend I bumped into two students on one of the bases and they asked me why I quit. I said that I didn't quit and that I was actually fired. They proceeded to tell me how they saw several girls in the class cry for the first time ever on the day our principal lied to the students in my class by telling them that I quit. Because many of them wanted to have closure and still see me, we arranged a last-minute covert farewell party. I've included the photo as evidence but I've covered all of their faces because of potential for retaliation. The teachers that came to my farewell party are not even featured at all because they were even more fearful of retaliation than these parents and students.
I also received these letters from a couple of my students that same day.
And another student who couldn't make it to the party had shared his thoughts with me through a class website we had used during my time as their teacher, where the students would practice writing to only other members of their class through a secure platform that required a student gmail account for sign-in.
Well as I continued to be vocal about the things that were happening to me and other teachers, I then began experiencing retaliation in forms that other teachers and military service members had never even heard of before. I was abandoned in the country and they refused to give me orders. I was left in the country without pay, without a housing allowance, without my military IDs, without access to base, without my license plates, without rights to ship my belongings home, and without rights to having a flight back. People have told me to claim abandonment and contact the embassy or JAG, but neither one could help. The embassy said to call JAG and JAG said they couldn't help me without ID (their original story was they couldn't help me as it was an employment issue). I don't know who to trust around here, but I do not want to stop being vocal about clear issues I'm noticing in education. I don't need tons of your money, but $5 in support will make a huge difference not only for helping me get home, but for helping get my story heard. More people need to be woken up about the realities of our US public education system, but that will not happen until more teachers, parents, and students begin speaking out about the real issues. Teachers not getting paid well enough is awful, but not the biggest issue. We have a high degree of nepotism and corruption in our systems, so even just choosing to support my cause by spreading my message will do wonders for our students, who are the biggest victims of what has now become our for-profit public education system. Thank you again and I appreciate you!
Organizer
Jimmy McKinney
Organizer
Rockville, MD
