In 2007, a small group of anonymous individuals attempted to destroy my teaching career, along with the careers of my wife, who was teaching with me at the time, and my principal.
They did this by excerpting parts of a blog I’d been writing since December 10, 2005 (which I continue to write today), and including those excerpts in a 27-page packet along with a defamatory letter that was sent to the Town Council, the Board of Education, The Hartford Courant, and, later, more than 300 families in my school district.
This saga lasted more than a year. It eventually involved parents, former students, colleagues, administrators, politicians, attorneys, police officers, and more.
It upended my life, along with the lives of my wife, my principal, and others, for a long time.
Longer than I could have ever expected.
For the past 18 years, I’ve been thinking about writing a memoir about this extraordinary time in my life. Thankfully, I kept constant, continuous, contemporaneous notes at the time and have tens of thousands of words written about the events, both in narrative and note form.
I also told a shortened version of the story for The Moth several years ago, which caused me to receive messages from people worldwide who have suffered similar anonymous attacks on their character and career.
In 2009, This American Life — the national radio show and podcast — offered to come to town to report on the incident, but after some consideration, I declined their offer. They assured that no stone would be left unturned and that names would be named, so I decided to move on and continue teaching, absent any continued drama.
After 18 years, I’ve decided to finally write the full story of the time, based on my memory, previous writing, notes, documents, correspondence, and interviews.
Eventually, I plan to publish this story as a memoir, but I begin the story on this Substack for two reasons:
I want to capture the story before I retire from teaching. I don’t want the story to appear as sour grapes after a successful teaching career.
I hope that by writing the story publicly like this, even more information will surface that will inform a future memoir.
If you have any information about the incident or can connect me with someone who does, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I presume I know most of what happened, but every year, new information seems to surface, so any additional information would be appreciated.
I will also be changing or leaving out the names of people whom I care about who might not want their names published as a part of the story.
If the person in question was not innocent in the incident, I will be publishing their names, of course, along with a fact-based account of their actions unless a reason for not doing so emerges.
I’ll be publishing as often as possible — probably a couple of times each week.
Feedback, comments, and waves of effusive excitement and love are all welcome.
I’m publishing this story on a free Substack — separate from my regular blog and separate from my paid Substack — so that the whole story can be found in one place and anyone can read it at any time.
You can subscribe here to receive each post as an email or read it on the Substack app: https://bit.ly/3JMY5yz
