Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
It's been a while since I linked to some updates on the Freshwater saga in Ohio. Richard Hoppe is still doing yeoman's duty following all the events, which have taken a turn to the bizarre to say the least. The latest weirdness began in early February when reports began circulating that Freshwater had gotten an anonymous tip that the school had dumped a bunch of documents that would help his case in the garbage, sending Freshwater dumpster diving at the school to find them.
Turns out that was partially true. Hoppe got a copy of the police report -- a found property report, not a criminal report -- and got the details. The first part was true, someone did call Freshwater and tip him off. But the documents were left in a plastic bag about a half mile from the school. Freshwater had his pastor go and pick them up since he was out of town.
By the way, the police report indicated that the pastor, Don Matolyak, took a friend with him who had a gun because he thought it might be an ambush. And he said he thought about calling the police thinking they might be in danger because someone might be setting up Freshwater to be hurt or killed. Seriously.
The bag contained several inches of paper documents and hundreds of photographs of items in Freshwater's classroom. They took it back to the church and got Freshwater's attorney, Kelly Hamilton, involved. Hamilton said they had to call the police and the police came and took the documents for safekeeping. How any of this is supposed to help Freshwater's case is unknown.
So contrary to the initial rumors, no documents were discarded. In fact, they may well have been stolen from the school by someone at the school. That would explain why the person was anonymous when they called Freshwater and apparently tried to disguise their voice.
But that's just the beginning. Now apparently Hamilton knows the identity of the person who left the documents and that person is willing to testify -- but only if it's done in private without them being identified because they fear for their safety. Hoppe rightly jumps on this:
As I noted earlier, this has gone past strange and is well into bizarro territory. Does the anonymous source fear that the Evil Atheist Conspiracy is going to take revenge on him/her? Are there mobs of evolutionists with torches and pitchforks waiting outside the walls of the hearing room? Not hardly, not in this county. The one slight justification I can see is if the anonymous source is a school employee and fears being fired for removing the black bag and its contents from the school without authorization (assuming it actually came from the school and not Freshwater's garage, which is not established). But as far as I know the hearing referee has no power to grant immunity from prosecution for theft, so taking the testimony in private won't solve that problem for him/her.Bear in mind that this is the same R. Kelly Hamilton who brought pressure to make the names of the Dennis family public after a federal court had granted them anonymity to protect them, particularly Zachary, from reprisals. And note that the Dennis family finally felt it necessary to move away from this community because their children were being subjected to harassment from other students and school staff - teachers and at least one coach. So why is Hamilton so hot to protect an adult's anonymity now?
After the B.S. story Don Matolyak offered to justify taking an armed escort with him to retrieve the black bag while deciding he didn't need the cops, I am of the opinion that this is just more of the smokescreen and is intended to amp up the drama casting John Freshwater as the poor persecuted Christian man in heathen Knox County, Ohio. It's designed solely to bring more pressure on the Board of Education to settle on Freshwater's terms. But Hamilton, Matolyak, and Freshwater appear to be becoming so enamored of their delusional fantasies of persecution that I fear for their ever more tenuous grasp on reality.
This just gets stranger and stranger.
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And the bag contained $40-some dollars in cash.
Presumably whatever nitwit is behind this thinks that would prove it was done by an honest person, because a crook would have taken the money.
My only question was why the bag didn't contain two wetsuits and a dildo.
Posted by: Jon H | March 4, 2010 12:30 PM
Posted by: Herod the Freemason | March 4, 2010 12:45 PM
How convenient for Freshwater that he was out of town and he had his pastor to use as an alibi
Posted by: Chilidog | March 4, 2010 12:48 PM
The thing I can't believe is the inordinate amount of time and money that's gone into a dismissal hearing for a local school teacher.
Posted by: tacitus | March 4, 2010 1:03 PM
ERV covered this a little while ago, focusing largely on the bag's odd contents:
http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/02/creationists_are_weird.php
My favourite comment from that thread - "Why would anyone need two whistles? SAMBA!"
Posted by: KristinMH | March 4, 2010 1:17 PM
As head of the EAC's Department of Corrective Phrenology, I can state without contradiction that Mr. Freshwater's case is a constant source of amusement, and we have no interest in influencing or affecting its inevitably hilarious outcome.
At least, that's what we want you to believe.
Posted by: Elf M. Sternberg | March 4, 2010 1:23 PM
Photographs? Like on film and everything? The only people that still use film these days are insurance adjusters and the like. I assume because it is harder to doctor film then digital photos.
What's up with that?
Posted by: Ferrous Patella | March 4, 2010 2:10 PM
tacitus, #4: The thing I can't believe is the inordinate amount of time and money that's gone into a dismissal hearing for a local school teacher.
Well, thank God that someone is finally standing up for the poor persecuted Christians in this country!
Posted by: Chiroptera | March 4, 2010 2:18 PM
No projection there, eh?
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | March 4, 2010 3:32 PM
@#4: Google "school teacher rubber room". In may places, teachers essentially can't be fired for any reason whatsoever, up to and including criminal misconduct. That tiny, tiny number who do get fired generally do so after years of litigation and 6-figure settlements.
Posted by: Matt Springer | March 4, 2010 3:32 PM
The hell with what was in the bag - The bottom line - Freshwater tortured students. Unless of course the bag just happened to contain documents from Yoo authorizing the Tesla Coil Body Application, and It's OK For Jesus Finding.
Posted by: J-Dog | March 4, 2010 3:40 PM
Wrong, J-Dog. He applied enhanced education techniques. Totally different.
Posted by: carlsonjok | March 4, 2010 5:34 PM
While it can be difficult to dismiss even those teachers that appear to have clearly violated some policy or law, we teachers are glad that those protections are there. Academic freedom in a public school can be very dangerous to exercise. The New Yorker article on the 'rubber room' idea didn't quite capture the feeling of risk teachers experience when they discuss controversial topics in class. One trouble is that it is not the teacher that decides what is controversial. The audience decides that. What may come off as a casual comment can be taken to heart (and often misunderstood or misconstrued) by a student. Without a strong principal to fend off inflamed parents, state tenure or due process laws provide some protection. My experience with the Nat. Ed. Association (NEA) has been that the union is extremely weak in protecting teachers, despite the claims from the right about its evil powers. The ACLU and Americans United provide much more effective support. I have no empathy for the specifics of the Freshwater case (at least as reported here), but I do understand the need to follow the procedures designed to protect the speech of all teachers. Procedural law is genuine law.
Posted by: Robert LaRue | March 4, 2010 5:51 PM
I agree with #13. In the end, dismissal of any professional employee is a very, very serious thing; and if firing teachers were easier, then there would be a lot of potential for schools to abuse this power. I absolutely think Freshwater is entitled to the fullest extent of procedural rights.
If it is true that he deliberately burned students' arms (something which I won't pre-judge until he has been through a full hearing in which all the evidence has been adduced), then obviously he needs to be fired, as he is a danger to safety. But I don't want to set the precedent that teachers can be fired, even for a good reason, without proper procedural protections.
Posted by: Walton | March 5, 2010 3:11 AM
I have to agree with Robert. First, it has been generally exaggerated how difficult it is to fire a teacher. In the first three, to five, to seven years, depending on where you are teaching, you can be "non-renewed" for just about anything, hair is too long, you didn't cross a T last Tuesday, etc. After that there are protections in place, and they often need to be there. I've had parents complain over the years, generally in the region where I teach they get upset if there is any mention of the idea that the world according to Genesis isn't the only explanation for the history of the world. I've had other parents who were furious because I taught what the 1st amendment actually said, not what they want it to say, (IE that the Constitution is based on the Bible, that we are a Christian nation, that mandatory prayer in school is supported by the Constitution, etc.)
Just like how our criminal justice system occasionally is abused by the guilty to obtain an innocent verdict, the protections for good, quality teachers who address critical and often controversial issues are occasionally abused by (apparent) dirtbags like Freshwater. That's a shame, but I'd rather have that happen than have a teacher easily fired because they weren't "discussing the weaknesses of Darwinianism (sic) and teaching biology from a proper Biblical perspective."
It is already difficult enough being a teacher. In my bassackwards state they're probably going to be implementing a massive cut in education (barring the passage of a highly unlikely sales tax increase referendum). That is above and beyond the cuts from last-this year and the fact that we were already 50th in educational spending (depending on the measure). Add to that we've got the increasingly helicopter parents who want the grades for their kids but don't want the kids to have to do any actual work to earn those grades, parents who want their kids to go to the ivy league while insisting that they shouldn't have any penalties for late work, missing assignments, etc. If you want to add the idea that it's easy to fire me to all of these headaches, including the fact that my already low salary has been going down the last two years in concert with my benefits becoming more expensive at the same time, the hell with it, I'll go back to the private sector.
You can expect educators to be only so altruistic before they tell you to take the job and shove it.
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 5, 2010 8:56 AM
In the end, dismissal of any professional employee is a very, very serious thing; and if firing teachers were easier, then there would be a lot of potential for schools to abuse this power.
I work in an at-will corporation, my wife works in a tenured school system. Both types of employment have their advantages and disadvantages, and I think our society is better for having both. I tend to think of employment security as a type of job benefit, like any other benefit: some jobs offer it, others don't, and you, the job-hunter, have to decide whether this benefit is worth what you pay for it in lower salary. Because you will pay for it - that's the nature of the job market.
Where I might disagree with Robert and Dogmeatib is that I don't think the world would end if the two types of employment were less strongly linked to specific job sectors. I.e. if some education and civil service positions had less security (and correspondingly higher pay!), and some private sector positions provided more job security and lower pay. Having said that, I fully support teachers against current (State and local) attempts to get rid of tenure: it is wrong to reduce tenure without significantly raising pay. Its also economically short-sighted; such strategies are just going to result in more good people leaving the teaching field.
Posted by: eric | March 5, 2010 9:35 AM
Eric,
While I see your argument concerning pay and benefit increases in concert with the potential elimination of tenure (IE trading pay for reduced job security), the problem with that argument lies in the nature of the job. Educators in many fields present difficult and controversial subjects. I have personally witnessed a family's attempt to get a biology teacher fired where the parents pushed the argument that the kid should be allowed to answer "God did it" on tests and papers in biology, should be allowed to proselytize to his classmates instead of doing other assignments, etc.
When the teacher didn't allow these ludicrous "alternatives," they then began taping the teacher in class, harassing them, contacting all of the administrators at the school, the educator's department chair, the district superintendent and their assistants, and even went to the board. At any point during the process, had a direct supervisor, middle manager, or CEO/board equivalent agreed with the parents in any way, that teacher likely would have been fired. Now if these are expected and acceptable impacts of doing your job in the private sector, I could agree with your argument, but if, on the other hand, your job doesn't involve such ideologically driven conflicts that are an integral part of the job, I have to disagree.
I regularly cover such controversial topics as religious conflict and disagreements (1st amendment and 14th amendment in government, reformation, enlightenment, inquisition, Darwin, astronomy, etc. in history). I have, as I mentioned earlier, had both students and parents complain because they believed my stance on an issue was "biased." In most of these cases it involved a discussion in class, on the phone, etc., in a few it involved complaints to administrators and, in one extreme case, a full administrative meeting. In all cases it was shown quite clearly that the student had either misinterpreted my statement (IE they heard something very different from what I actually said) and/or had very strongly held belief systems that considered any neutral ground (let alone disagreement) to be hostile to their beliefs, IE they were extremists. In each case, potentially, a like minded person in a supervisory position over me could have used it as grounds for terminating my employment despite my extensive qualifications and impeccable record. IE I could have been fired for doing my job precisely within guidelines based solely on someone else's beliefs that are actually in conflict with history, government, etc.
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 5, 2010 12:42 PM
Yep... been there, been done like that.
I teach anthropology, cultural diversity, geography and video/film production (fortunately not all at the same time)... and every course is loaded with opportunities for parental attack. Woody Allen has a short piece from years ago entitled "What is taught versus what is caught" that parodies what kids think they heard us say versus what we actually said. We don't have tenure, as such, in Colorado we have guaranteed due process (interesting that they had to specify that!) in termination matters. I'm constantly amazed at what is caught... despite 26 years of constant rewriting of my presentations for clarity.
Posted by: Robert LaRue | March 5, 2010 2:00 PM
Why do people keep accusing him of burning students with a tesla coil? He never did that. It was a high-voltage generator used for ionising gas samples.
Schools don't keep teslas around - too dangerous. They do keep gas ionisers.
Posted by: Suricou Raven | March 5, 2010 3:02 PM
Dogmeatib: At any point during the process, had a direct supervisor, middle manager, or CEO/board equivalent agreed with the parents in any way, that teacher likely would have been fired. Now if these are expected and acceptable impacts of doing your job in the private sector, I could agree with your argument, but if, on the other hand, your job doesn't involve such ideologically driven conflicts that are an integral part of the job, I have to disagree.
Certainly an at-will environment can allow for unfair and sometimes politically-motivated firings. I won't dispute that. But I guess from my personal experience I think it would happen a lot less often than you think. Even with parental pressure, I think good bosses will go to bat for good employees.
Could a bad/"like-minded" principal select for fundamentalist faculty? Sure. But that happens under the tenure system too. Its not a conseuqence of either system. Example: the reason Freshwater is getting fired now after ten years is because for the first eight of those ten years, the school administration was on his side.
And again, I'm not arguing for one or another so much as a mix. Why not have a system where a district offers the teacher their choice of system: you can go tenure track, or at-will and get a $X,000/year bonus.
Posted by: eric | March 5, 2010 3:27 PM
The biggest problem I see with this idea is that monetary bonuses are one of the very first things that disappear when states/districts run into financial trouble. Right now our state is (like 47 of the others) dealing with serious budget issues. Their response has been to cut education funding. The first place it happened was in bonuses like you describe. Teachers who were doing extra duties, etc., lost the money they had previously been paid to do those extra duties. The majority of them, because those activities helped the kids, continued to do them despite losing the money. This year, with the bigger budget bite, they're looking at all of the incentives, all of the coaches salaries, all of the bonuses and benefits for attending activities, improving student performance, and at least a $2000 pay cut across the board. Personally I took what amounts to a 20% pay cut this year and look at another 5-10% this year due to lost "bonuses" as you put it. I'm the type of teacher you generally assume would accept that $X,000/year bonus, so I would be looking at the additional 5-10% cut this year + $X,000 of that bonus.
Of course the question is, when the economy comes back, how many of these incentives will return, or will it simply be assumed that teachers will do these things as part of their normal duties. I can tell you from personal experience, the expectation and attitude is generally the latter rather than the former.
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 5, 2010 7:08 PM