My Bad Boss Saga

Everyone has at least one bad boss story to share, and its time to tell you mine. This might be more of a psycho boss story though. Its okay because in the end – she gets exactly what she deserves. The year I began teaching was also the year a new director of special education started working for the school district I taught for. I’d known the former director, as I’d worked as a contractor to the district for four years prior. The new director was freshly imported from one of the biggest school districts in the United States – to our tiny little two high school district sitting on the river. In typical bad boss fashion, she came in guns blazing and thinking she would turn everything upside down to bring our district up to par.

Our district was one that was steeped in tradition. The school board hadn’t had a new face in Lord knows how many years – running for office was just a formality. A new superintendent has recently been hired only because the previous one had recently died of cancer after holding the job for over 20 years. It was known as big the place where administrators either came as a stepping stone on their way to working in one of the larger school districts in the surrounding area, or where older administrators came to pad their salaries in their final working years before retirement. The older high school building served the poorer and ethnically diver side side of town, the new high school served the mostly white and affluent side. It was just your very stereotyped school system.

Ms. Bad Boss, as I will refer to here from here on out, came in and started trying to change everything from day one. During her first year, she apparently made quite a few enemies both at the central office and among the teachers in general. It was during the summer school program for special needs students that first summer that my friend invited her to come have drinks and such with a group of us. She explained that Ms. Bad Boss seemed so lonely – so we began making an effort to befriend her and have her join our group of friends. We began inviting her to come out for Friday night happy hours with us. We listened to her stories of her boyfriend and best friends – halfway across the country where she’d moved from to take her current job.

She and I got to be rather close friends during our third year working in the district. I spent a good portion of that fall helping Ms. Bad Boss inventorying, organizing, and distributing an entire new reading program she’d purchased for the district. I got ‘paid’ in some free dinners and gratitude, which was fine by me. It was even better when she admitted to a group of teachers that she had no clue what she was doing – she was just following my directions – and I had the inventory system figured out. I didn’t help to win favor with her, like some people may have. I did it because I knew someone had to take charge of helping, or the materials would never have gotten distributed! We got everything in September and by the second week of November everything had gone to the teachers. That was pretty fast work for 2-3 people working a couple days after school, a few days each week.

It was that spring when things began to fall a part. I knew Ms. Bad Boss had something bad going on at work. For some reason one Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, I went by central office and asked her if she wanted to go grab something to eat. We went to a nearby restaurant and she began to tell me how the superintendent had come into her office that morning and presented her with her yearly evaluation paperwork. To sum it up – she was screwed. As we left the restaurant, she started crying and we ended up sitting in my car for a good 45 minutes while she fell apart. The next day she decided to fight what she felt were the inaccuracies in the evaluation and even called me in the middle of my teaching classes to provide her with evidence for her rebuttal. She ended up succeeding and her job was safe for another year.

During the next month or two, I started to suffer from severe depression. Ms. Bad Boss had talked previously about her own depression and being on medication at happy hours, so I ended up letting her know. For awhile she was very helpful and encouraging – then she started getting snappy or completely stopping the text conversations we’d often have if I mentioned anything about having a rough time. This was when I’d always ask how she was doing, how her mom was (who was battling breast cancer), etc. I was attending a summer workshop that she and a teacher from the district middle school were putting on that summer. On about the third day of it – I decided to ask her what was up. She went off on me so viciously that I can never forget it!

She told me how she didn’t want to hear another word about my depression and I wasn’t a good friend for talking to her about it! She went on to say I needed to just smile and that would fix everything. claiming she was going to help me – she said she would now ignore anything I said that wasn’t positive. I stood there in shock. Had we not been in the middle school’s hallway with other people nearby, my reaction probably would have been to go off on her. Instead I just stared at her – silently grabbed my purse – and walked out of the building. I skipped the next day of the workshop and we didn’t really speak for a week or two afterwards. I later tried to smooth things over but she always had an excuse to not be able to meet up, etc.

The following year, I had to resign due to a serious medical condition. I continued to get all the good gossip from a friend who worked at the high school I’d taught at though. The special education department chairperson was fired, my friend and another teacher were the candidates to replace her. Ms. Bad Boss and the school’s principal were the ones to make the decision. My friend barely got 5 minutes of interview time as a courtesy – it was obvious they had picked the other teacher before even doing the interviews. We quickly found out why! It turns out the other teacher had recently introduced Ms. Bad Boss to a man she was now dating. As Bad Boss’s relationship with that man got better, the other teacher got more ‘favors’ until Ms. Bad Boss was engaged to the man. The other teacher was then promoted to a cushy job at central office where she basically got to make her own schedule and didn’t truly teach anymore. It was politics and favoritism at its finest.

As we all know though – karma is a bitch and a beautiful thing indeed. Later that year it came knocking loudly on Ms. Bad Boss’s door. It came in the form of a lawsuit filed against the district and Ms. Bad Boss by the parent of a teenage student. The girl has a special hearing aid and beginning in 5th grade was receiving electric shocks when she touched things in her school building. Ms. Bad Boss refused to believe the girl was telling the truth – even after she was taken from the school by ambulance. Eventually, damage was discovered to a large underground wire that ran to the school. There continued to be clashes between the school district and the family. To keep it brief – the school district wasn’t fixing the girl the assistance at school they legally were obligated to, and Ms. Bad Boss refused to believe the girl’s health issues were legitimate. Finally, the girls mother had no option left but to sue.

Ms. Bad Boss left the district in disgrace, fired after being the cause of this lawsuit being filed against the school district. As far as I know, she’s not obtained any new job since that happened last spring. Her chances of getting a job in this state are zero as every superintendent in the area knows when something as big as a lawsuit happens. I actually saw her in early December – at the airport as I picked up my fiancé as he came into town. I think she must’ve been on the same flight as him out of the main hub in Atlanta. I figure she was probably coming back home after job hunting out of state. Unfortunately for her, high level jobs in education are hard to come by – especially when you have a less than stellar record.