Upon arriving there on Tuesday morning, however, Oliver quickly noticed the tone was all wrong. He was an unwelcome intruder, the principal immediately made clear.
“I met with the principal, Shannon Brown,” Oliver wrote in the “Bias and Retaliation” log that the union had asked him to keep:
The first sentence Mrs. Brown said to me was the second-grade position was already filled. I responded that it had been agreed that the second-grade position was what I was coming here for. Mrs. Brown responded there is a full-time sub in that position now and we want to hire her for that position this coming year, so if you go ahead and teach that position now, I just wanted to let you know that we are going to hire her for that position next year.
Principal Brown’s evident enmity was not, however, Oliver’s only new problem.
Mum’s the word
During Friday’s late-afternoon meeting at the Pink Palace and afterward, when Jara and his chief of staff had informed Oliver and his attorney that CCSD would be launching a district-wide investigation of administrator grade-cheating, they also warned him not say a word to anybody at Treem or the next school he was going to about what he had reported.
Oliver had immediately pointed out there was a big hole in such a “mum’s-the-word” strategy: Namely, that the Treem brass already knew of his reporting, since the union — in its many attempts over previous months to get Jara to meet — had gone to the Nevada Department of Education, which then contacted Treem administrators, making inquiries.
In addition, many teachers at Treem not only knew of the administrators’ changing of grades in Infinite Campus using Oliver’s classroom computers and personal pass code — but also that he’d gone to his union about it.
However, all Jara said, according to Oliver, was, “No one will find out; just don’t talk about it.”
In the phone call later that evening, that same directive was repeated to Oliver: Keep silent about what had happened at Treem and also the supposedly looming district-wide investigation. It was supposed to take about a year.
If word got out, he was told, the investigation could be compromised.
Thus — while the Beckley administrators were now regularly complaining to him that no final observation on his teaching had come over from Treem — Oliver himself was barred from explaining.
A remark one of the Beckley administrators made to Oliver suggests that Jara’s office may, indeed, have contacted the school and attempted to neutralize questions about James’ final Treem observation. If so, however, it had little effect.
“We don’t know what the secret is,” said Brown, according to Oliver, “or why you are over here and anything like that. But you know, it’s none of our business. We’re going to give you a fair shot.”
Actually, however, Beckley’s principal and assistant principal soon revealed they were under instructions from their midlevel district boss to do nothing until they received the (toxic) Treem observation. According to the log Oliver was keeping under instructions from his union, Principal Brown and Vice Principal Trupp on Friday, January 18 “called me into their office, where:
Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Trupp told me they could not give me an evaluation [by] coming in and observing me [in class, which they’d already done] until they received all my observations from Treem Admin. I responded that I was told they were not going to use that. Mrs. Brown responded their admin told them not to grade any of my observations until they receive all my observations…. (Emphasis added.)