Bibb County Schools: Part 5, The Classroom

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82 min read

Last updated October 28, 2026

Bibb County Watchdog, Part 5 of Six

The View from the Classroom

A note before the evidence: if you teach in Bibb County, or you are a parent here, your account belongs in this record too. The comments below are open, and no one needs your real name: post under any name you like. What I value is the real thing, factual stories about what you have actually seen and lived in this district. If you have one, please tell it.

At Rutland High School, the school day ended at 2:35. The contract day did not. Teachers were on the clock until 3:00, and in that building 3:00 meant 3:00: not 2:59, not 2:57, not one second before. So every afternoon, in the last ten minutes of the day, the faculty of a public high school in Macon, Georgia, drifted toward the front of the building and assembled at a single glass door, bags in hand, to wait for a clock to grant them permission to leave. Nothing about the scene was dramatic. That lack of drama is what made it revealing.

We were allowed out through one entrance. The building had other exits, plenty of them, closer to our classrooms and closer to our cars. At the school where I taught before Rutland, teachers left by whichever door made sense. At Rutland we filed to the front, through the glass, like students waiting on a bell we were supposedly too old to need.

I did not believe, at first, that the rule was real. Teachers said the principal, Wendy Pooler, reprimanded anyone who left early, and by early they meant a minute, and by a minute they meant a second. Grown professionals, people with master’s degrees and doctorates, people who had raised children and buried parents, stood at that door and watched a clock. I filed it under exaggeration until the afternoon I tested it. That story is coming. First, the terms.

This part is also published in Spanish: Bibb County Schools: Parte 5, El Aula.

This series is reader-supported. Nobody at a district office or an advertiser’s desk pays for it. If it earns it, you can buy me a coffee or back the work on Patreon.

Parts 1 through 4 of this investigation ran on documents: budgets, vendor payments, salary records, audited reports, the district’s own commissioned studies. You could check every number. Part 5 runs on me. I taught in Bibb County classrooms for eleven years, seven at Central High School and four at Rutland High School, and I retired in March 2026. The first four parts were written for readers at desks. This one is written about a teacher standing in front of thirty students at 8 in the morning, and it is written from the point of view of the person receiving the district’s decisions.

Four kinds of evidence appear here, each labeled as it arrives: the record (state data, district documents, the numbers the district itself paid to have produced); my testimony; other people’s testimony, graded for what each voice actually is; and my own contemporaneous papers, which are evidence of what I wrote, not of what the district did. Where the record and my memory disagree, the record wins. Where there is no record, I will say so, and you may weigh my word accordingly. The district will call this the work of a disgruntled former employee. I was an employee. I am former. Read the numbers and decide about the rest.

I came to Bibb County almost by accident. Years earlier I had filed an application with the district and forgotten it. In late July, with the school year about to start, the principal of Central High School found it, called me out of the blue, and said they were desperate for a Spanish teacher. I knew nothing about Georgia licensure and assumed that a district desperate enough to exhume a forgotten application would explain how things worked. It did not. A substitute covered my classes for a week or two while the paperwork sorted itself out, and then I was thrown in, which is the only honest phrase for it. Nobody explained the protocol, the printers, the meetings, the forms. For my first months I was paid fifteen dollars an hour, the rate of a long-term substitute, because I was not yet licensed in Georgia.

The teaching was never my problem. I had taught thirteen years in Japan, ten of them as an associate professor at some of Japan’s best universities, and the content was the easy part. The trouble was everything around it, and the help, when it came, came sideways: from other teachers, in hallways, as favors. From above I got almost nothing, and the pattern held for eleven years.

A note on a missing word. The district styles her Dr. Pooler, and the reader will search this article in vain for that title from me. I hold a research doctorate, and I reserve the word Doctor for the degree that earned it. Her doctorate is an EdD from Valdosta State University. Mine is a PhD. The EdD was defined, in the words of Lee Shulman and his co-authors in Educational Researcher, “by subtraction, with fewer requirements than the Ph.D. and much less emphasis on full-time study and residency,” and was, they noted, “often known as the ‘Ph.D. lite.’” Even the degree’s own reformers concede the reputation: Jill Perry of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate has written that “the Ed.D. was viewed as less rigorous than a Ph.D.” I have made the full argument elsewhere. In these pages she is Pooler, or Principal Pooler, and that is a considered judgment, not an oversight.

I am not stingy with the title where it was earned. Dr. Keturah Reese was an assistant principal at Central in my final year there. Hers is a PhD from Mercer University’s Tift College of Education, earned in 2015 on a research dissertation about literacy in the high school biology classroom, and she carried it the way every true PhD I met in Bibb County carried it, with intellectual curiosity and no ego whatsoever. She is Central’s principal now. Congratulations, Dr. Reese. Central could not be in better hands.

Now the door. I had one small protest, and I practiced it daily: I never stood there. The other teachers gathered at the glass and waited for three o’clock like passengers at a gate, and I would not join them. I knew how long it took to walk from my classroom to that door, and I timed my departure so that I arrived moving, slid through the standing crowd and out, five or ten seconds early, every day. Five seconds is nothing. It was also mine.

Then came the afternoon of the test. I had a dentist appointment at 3:15, about twenty minutes from the school. Five minutes, I decided, would not kill anybody, and I left at about 2:55. The other Spanish teacher called me afterward to tell me the principal had made an announcement in the building about Mr. Wood leaving early. She already had a name for Pooler. In my first year at Rutland she started calling her Pissy Pooler, and she gave me two reasons: “she pisses me off,” and piscina, the Spanish word for pool. To this day it still makes me chuckle, and perhaps it is a joke that deserves to come out of retirement.

The next day an email arrived: contract hours are 7 to 3, and I was expected to be there for all of them, not leaving one second before. Nobody asked why I had gone. A question would have taken ten seconds and the answer was a dentist’s chair. The reprimand took less.

Before that email, I had been arriving thirty minutes early every day, unpaid and unremarked, the way most teachers do, because the work does not fit inside the contract hours. After it, I arrived five or ten minutes early, just enough to be standing in my classroom at 7:00, which is all the contract demanded. The email bought the building five minutes of my presence, once. It cost the better part of a donated half hour, every school day, for the rest of my time there. That is a trade administrators make all over that district, every day, at scale, and then they commission studies to find out why the teachers keep leaving.

I had a standard of comparison, and it is why the small humiliations of that building landed on me the way they did. Thirteen of my twenty-four years in classrooms were spent in Japan, three in junior and senior high schools and ten at universities, as an associate professor. In Japan, every teacher is called sensei. The word is not a courtesy. It is the same word the language uses for a judge, for a lawyer, for a medical doctor, for a professor. The schoolteacher is filed, by the language itself, in the company of the people a society most honors, and the honor ran in every direction: students brought it, parents brought it, and so did the teachers and administrators around me. Respect there was not a poster in the hallway. It was the assumption the whole building started from, every morning. I was proud of the work. I told everyone I knew that I was a professor. I let the world know.

Then I came home and took a classroom in Georgia, and the respect was gone. Not thinned. Gone. America does not hold its teachers in anything like that regard, which is a strange ingratitude, because there is no profession in this country that did not begin in a classroom. Every doctor was first somebody’s student. Every lawyer, every judge, sat in a room like mine, in front of a teacher whose work made everything after it possible. A country that forgets the first link in that chain eventually starts losing links.

But I want to aim this precisely, because the public was not the sharpest edge of it. Parents can be hard, and students are children, and children test the adults in front of them; that is the job, and I signed up for it. The disrespect that ground me down came from my own side of the desk: from administrators, the people whose one charge is to stand between teachers and everything that is not teaching. In Bibb County that charge was inverted, and the inversion was administered in small things: a fee of five dollars for the right to wear jeans on a Friday, a permission form, with proof attached, before a grown professional could keep a dentist’s appointment. None of it appears in a budget. All of it appears in what follows. Humiliation in small doses, delivered by the people above you, is not a side effect of that system. It is the system’s native language.

Here is how I know what it cost. In Japan I told the world what I did. In eleven years of teaching in Bibb County, I never mentioned it. Not on Facebook, not anywhere on social media, not even to friends in other states. People who had known me for years did not know I was a teacher. I hid it because saying it carried a shame I could not have explained to them, an embarrassment manufactured out of the constant humiliations and degradations of a toxic school environment, until the job I had once announced with pride became the thing I kept quiet about. I have turned that silence over many times since. The fact that I hid it speaks volumes in and of itself.

Japan gave me a standard of comparison. So did Macon, earlier, and in a different way. The teachers who taught me at Stratford Academy, which was then and remains the finest school in Middle Georgia, were treated as free, respected professionals. They knew their content, and they were allowed to teach the actual content, without the nonsense that public school teachers are put through. That trust was the starting assumption, not a reward for good behavior.

The teachers at Rutland were not lesser people. They were equally capable people, buried under the machinery of a bad system: permission regimes, scripted compliance, convocation theater, five-dollar jeans, and forms. In Stratford, the teacher figured as a trusted professional. In Bibb, the same kind of teacher figured as a managed child. The difference was never the teachers. It was the system standing over them, and the respect or contempt it started from.

My parents did not send me to Stratford just because they offered AP language levels in Spanish, French, and Latin; they sent me for the overall education. I did not come from a wealthy background. My father worked at the Georgia Kraft paper mill in Macon. Paying Stratford tuition was an enormous sacrifice for them, and they made it willingly, to keep me out of the disaster that was the Bibb County school system at the time, and unfortunately still is.

The gratitude I owe is owed to my mom and dad, not to a private school, and not as a brief for private schools over public ones. It is a thank you to a mill worker and his wife, who aimed at something better for their son. Had they not made that sacrifice, I’m sure my life would not be nearly as fortunate as it turned out to be.

Stratford, in my time, was a small school, sixty-three students in my own graduating class, and it offered Spanish, French, and Latin, each through AP. I took French, and only French. I took it for four years, finished with AP French, and scored a 5.

Spanish came later. I began Spanish only as a university freshman, and I learned it in a year at the Universidad de Sevilla. The French foundation from Stratford, plus that university start, plus Seville, is what built the rest of my working life: teaching Spanish, and then teaching it at a higher level, with a PhD in Linguistics behind it.

That is the standard I carried into Bibb County, and it is why the comparison matters. Had I attended Bibb County back then, I think I am extremely confident my life would have ended very differently. I spent 24 years teaching, 11 of them in Bibb public schools, giving away what Stratford gave me. That is not a complaint about the gift. It is the measure of what a system that trusts its teachers can set in motion, and what a system that starts from contempt can waste.

The studies, the numbers and the teachers are all in what follows. So are the rooms where it happened, and the door they all had to leave by.

The Daily Machinery

Every school year I taught in Bibb County, all eleven of them, began the same way: with the district taking the first morning away from the people who needed it most. Teachers reported to their schools at about 7 on the first day back, then were put on hot, uncomfortable buses and hauled across town to the Macon Coliseum for the annual convocation. Hours of it. An arena is built for basketball and concerts, not speeches, and the sound in that building made a human voice loud, echoing, and impossible to follow, while school bands played at full volume and a few thousand teachers mostly could not make out the words.

Most years, at some point, I hid in the bathroom and sat on my phone because the noise gave me a headache. Around me was the compulsory enthusiasm of the thing, people performing morale for the cameras. What every teacher I knew wanted was the one thing the morning was designed to deny us: to be in our own classrooms, setting them up. That work did not vanish because the district bused us downtown. It moved to our evenings and weekends and unpaid hours, which is where a great deal of the district’s business quietly gets done.

I have no documented Bibb figure for what that morning cost, and I am not going to invent one. The research for this article searched for a price on the keynote, the venue, the buses and the matching t-shirts, and found no public document pricing any of it for any year from 2015 to 2026. The cost I can document from my own seat is the cost every teacher in that arena was counting. It was a morning of classroom preparation, taken at the one moment of the year when preparation was the whole job. The shirts I found ugly and uncomfortable besides.

Another district shows the road not taken. In Fayette County, Kentucky, in 2024, the district booked a celebrity speaker for its arena convocation, and teachers, retired principals and the union revolted, in public, on exactly Bibb’s grievance: the time belonged in classrooms. The superintendent canceled the convocation and converted the day into a teacher workday. (The speaker was $26,500 and the arena was $30,000, per WKYT’s reporting; those are that district’s figures, not a claim about Bibb’s books.) Another district had already shown, in public, that a different choice was possible, after trying the arena first. Bibb has had eleven years of first days since my first one. It is still on the bus.

My verdict on convocation has not changed in eleven years: a waste of time and money, and worse than the waste, a punishment dressed as a celebration. If they want teachers to stay, it is a strange way to start every year.

My first year at Rutland, the district took the morning and the school took what was left of the day. Back at the building, Pooler sent the faculty out on a team-building treasure hunt at the shopping development across the way, teachers dispatched into stores on a scavenger errand for about an hour before lunch. It was late July in Macon, and in my experience of it, brutal heat, the kind that sits on your chest. I watched older colleagues, teachers visibly struggling in that heat, walking around that parking lot red as beets, sunburned, sweating through their clothes, on the first day of the school year, in the name of team building. It remains one of the most miserable experiences of my professional life. Team building, it turns out, is easiest to schedule when someone else has to endure the physical discomfort.

Those two scenes show the machinery at its clearest. Time and bodies were treated as raw material. The rest was duller and heavier. A teacher’s day was a stack of obligations that never quite closed: instruction, then the emails, the meetings, the data collection, the forms, the same information entered into systems that did not talk to each other. I was never trained on any of it. The planning time listed on the schedule was never the same as time a teacher could actually use for planning, and meetings about planning took even that time. Georgia’s own Teacher Burnout Task Force found the same pattern statewide in 2022. The district publishes no Bibb document that contradicts me. It also publishes none that supports its own side.

Lesson plans were not a page sketched before class. They were detailed documents that took hours to write, built on a template the district changed from year to year, so last year’s work had to be rebuilt in the new format, even though I found the curriculum and provided resources inadequate for the demands the plans had to document. That is testimony, from the man who produced them. In August 2025 I drafted a researched memo proposing a saner system. My own records do not establish that it was ever sent, and I will not claim it was. I have no evidence that administrators ever received the memo. That limitation matters. I spent so much time meeting the district’s routine paperwork requirements that even preparing a proposal for improving those requirements became another burden.

The plans had a sibling in GaLEADS, Georgia’s educator evaluation platform. I kept a copy of a building memo from that fall. It required teachers to complete every component of their GaLEADS goals by noon Friday. For teachers of tested subjects, it also declared the student growth measure data accurate and mandatory. Spanish is not a tested subject. When I sat down to enter my goals, the growth measure field was locked, and the documentation around it assumed common assessments and a departmental rubric that I did not, in fact, use. I was not disciplined over the GaLEADS entry, and I make no such claim. I was required to keep the record accurate for the district, while the district’s locked field was allowed to be inaccurate about me.

The consequences of these policies were especially clear in an incident another Rutland teacher described to me. A teacher who still works in that building told it to me, which is why it carries no name, no subject and no date. I have withheld identifying details to protect this teacher’s privacy. She still works at Rutland, and I do not want this account to expose her to professional consequences.

A Rutland classroom runs on a 90-minute block, with five-minute transitions, and a floor of teachers may share one or two single-stall restrooms. Ten to fifteen adults, five minutes, one door. There is no system for covering a teacher who needs to step out. The only workaround is the one teachers everywhere use: catch the colleague across the hall during seatwork, ask her to keep an eye on your class, and go. This teacher did exactly that. She arranged the coverage, and in her account and in her belief she had covered the class, and she stepped out. When she came back, the principal was already sitting in her classroom, having slipped in behind her, asking why she had left her class alone. She was reprimanded for abandoning a class she had, in fact, covered, using the only method her employer made available.

Teachers with ordinary bodies learn to limit how much water they drink so they can wait for the bell. That is not only a metaphor. It is how the district manages people at the level of the body. The system fails to provide a simple way to cover a class, and then the principal treats that failure as one teacher’s misconduct. I will return to that pattern, because it repeats.

I can add my own experience to that story, because I used the same workaround the reprimanded teacher used. It was the building’s real system for covering classes, even though it was not authorized. There was effectively one teacher restroom, in the lounge, and a break short enough that at most one or two teachers could use it before the bell took the rest. Student restroom doors, meanwhile, were kept locked, so when my class needed a bathroom break I had to take the entire class down the hall, no one permitted to stay behind, and burn five to ten minutes of instruction standing guard outside a door. On those trips I used a student bathroom myself while my boys were in theirs. I was not about to hold it for ninety minutes to preserve a rule whose purpose nobody could explain to me. (A public review of Rutland posted in August 2025 complains of the same locked bathrooms; that is a reviewer’s account, not a district document, and I cite it only to show the arrangement was visible from outside the faculty too.)

During class itself, the other Spanish teacher and I ran the system the reprimanded teacher used: I knocked on her window or she knocked on mine, she stepped into the hall and watched my class, and I did the same for her. That ran in my first two years at Rutland, while she was still in the building. The principal found that arrangement in another teacher’s room and called it abandonment. In every room where it kept the school day survivable, it was called coverage, and everyone in the building knew the difference except the office.

Lunch was the day’s other rationed minute, and I will keep its account honest in both directions. It ran twenty-five minutes, in three sittings, because the cafeteria was too small to seat the school at once; I believe that holds at every high school in the district, and I state it as belief, not audit.

Now the credit, in the words I said to myself for four years: the one good thing I can say about Rutland and Pooler is that for most of my years teaching at Rutland we were spared lunch duty and breakfast duty, and teachers elsewhere will know what a mercy that is. Most is not never. Lunch duty appeared for a month or two at the beginning of my last year before quietly going away, there was breakfast duty at times, and on the rough days, when fights or trouble closed the cafeteria, the students ate their lunches in our rooms with us. At Central, under the previous administration, I was assigned all of those duties. That meant hours of a trained teacher’s day spent standing around like furniture. Rutland did not take that break away. It only made it twenty-five minutes long and called it lunch.

And underneath all of it, small and constant, was the passing of the hat. Across my eleven years, teachers were asked to donate money for various causes with remarkable frequency, on top of students perpetually selling chocolates, coffee mugs and candy to their own teachers. Teachers are among the lowest paid professionals there are, and the hat kept coming around anyway. The exhibit that angers me most is the jeans fee. Instead of simply allowing teachers to dress comfortably for a job that is not the cleanest work, the school charged five dollars for the privilege of wearing jeans on Fridays. Five dollars to wear your own pants. If jeans are acceptable on Friday for five dollars, why are they not acceptable every day for free? The fee exposes that the rule was never about professionalism. I found it demeaning, and I still do.

There were also the sunshine clubs, which teachers were expected to join and pay dues to, and whose entire return, in my experience, was a birthday card or the like; I refused, and it was, thankfully, voluntary. And there was the United Way, with people at the school appointed almost as recruiters, in my word begging, pressuring and shaming colleagues into donating. Kids asking you for money, staff asking you for money, pay to wear jeans, pay for this, pay for that, on a teacher’s salary. All of it is my testimony of the in-building experience, and so is my summary of the pattern: a system that underpays its teachers, then monetizes their comfort and taps their wallets for its causes.

One change under Superintendent Dan Sims affected my classroom directly: the district’s repeated revisions to the school schedule. The superintendent who began on July 1, 2022 reorganized a great deal on paper. From inside the room, almost none of it arrived. The schedule did arrive, in the way everything in that district arrives. It was rebuilt every year, over and over, until nobody could remember which version they were using. When I started in Bibb we taught seven classes a day, about fifty-three minutes each. Then the churn began and never really stopped: advisement periods, homerooms of one shape and then another, a Wednesday advisement that was basically a two-hour homeroom, coaching days, so many weird schedules that I cannot remember them all. There is a sentence of mine that sums up the district’s whole theory of improvement, and I have said it for years: Bibb County seems to throw anything against the wall every year and hope that it sticks.

In April 2025 I set my objection down in writing, and the contemporaneous words are better than my memory. In the 2024-25 school year we ran a rotation of seven classes stretched across the year, and the plan for the next year was eight classes, all year long, alternating, not the semester block I had taught under elsewhere. It just doesn’t work, I wrote, as well as a traditional block schedule would. Scheduled planning time survived only two or three days a week under it, and the other days meant children from 7:00 in the morning until the end of the school day with no break at all, which I recorded at the time as very stressful, the understatement of a man being polite in writing. The next year the eight-class model arrived in my room as planned: four classes on Monday, four different classes on Tuesday, alternating all year, with eight subjects for every student to keep track of every single week. Imagine eight tests in one week. Imagine being fifteen and keeping eight subjects in your brain and your notebooks at once, or being the teacher trying to build depth in a subject that builds on itself, in a structure that keeps interrupting that progress. Under a traditional block, four courses a semester, a student could finish a full year of a subject in a single semester of daily work, with depth. My verdict on Bibb’s model, and I own it: a stupid failure, and they need to change it. That was the Sims era from my desk. Not a speech, not a scandal, not a single visit. A schedule, thrown against a wall, in a building full of people who had learned not to bother catching what the district threw.

It came up at a faculty meeting, the way it came up everywhere. The word of the year was critical thinking; it was the word of every year. Pooler preached it as settled doctrine, and she gave the example she had plainly given before: students did not need to know the capital of Oregon, because they could always look it up.

I sat there flabbergasted. I still am. Critical thinking is real, and it matters, and it does not float free of knowledge. It runs on knowledge. A mind analyzes with what it has stored: the capitals and the equations, the periodic table, the grammar, the dates, the vocabulary. Strip out the memorization and you have not freed the student to think. You have left him nothing to think with.

The research on this point is not new. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, wrote the sentence in 2007 that answers it for me: “You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize.” In a 1988 study, weak readers who knew baseball understood and remembered a passage about baseball better than strong readers who did not. On that passage, knowledge beat reading skill, decades ago.

You cannot look up what you do not know exists. A phone can find the capital of Oregon in two seconds, for a student who knows there are states, and capitals, and an Oregon. Teach a child that facts are clutter and the phone is the brain, and you have not built a thinker. You have built a computer operator, hoping the machine will substitute for the mind he was never asked to build.

And then there is the door again, because in that building everything eventually came back to the door. It was not my private grievance alone. It was the faculty’s grievance. If you stood at the glass at 2:55, you were looking at a workforce that had stopped giving extra time. They had not stopped in protest. They had stopped after doing the accounting. In my reading, each of them had their own version of my five minutes: a moment when the system taught them the exact value of their goodwill, and each had adjusted their giving to match. A principal can run a building that way. It will run exactly to contract, and the cost will not appear on any ledger the central office keeps. It appears later, in the spring, when the resignations come in.

I retired in March 2026 and cannot see that door now, so I describe it in the past tense and will not pretend to a ritual I no longer witness. What I can describe is what built it, because I walked through that crowd every day at five seconds to three.

Support That Wasn’t

Ask a Bibb teacher where help comes from and watch the pause. That pause is also evidence, of a kind no dashboard in that district collects. In my eleven years, help came sideways or it did not come at all. Here is what the absence looked like in the building where I finished.

In the fall of 2022, at my first faculty meeting at Rutland, two young teachers, Mr. Gunter and Miss Van Atta, asked Pooler about starting a Gay-Straight Alliance at the school. I had founded the GSA at Central two years before transferring, so I had something to offer. In my account, the question received evasive talk rather than an answer. I raised my hand and offered to help the two teachers create the club. The response I got was a look I can only describe as menacing, and then silence: at least fifteen to twenty seconds of it by my count, before she answered, to the effect that I did not interrupt another teacher.

The next day, the school secretary summoned me. Pooler wanted to see me after school, in a large conference room, where I found her seated with both assistant principals, Mr. Nichols and Miss Stewart, solemn and arranged as a panel. To my recollection, the assistant principals did not speak during the entire meeting. I had offered, during a faculty meeting and on the topic under discussion, to help two colleagues start a student club, and that offer was being treated as an offense requiring a formal hearing. I recorded that meeting, on September 14, 2022. I had my own reason: after the faculty meeting exchange, I wanted a record of what was said to me that could not later be described in a different way. A few weeks into a new job, a veteran teacher judged that his own principal’s words needed a witness.

The recording holds a meeting about the faculty meeting exchange: my tone, in her account, and the fact that she is not usually interrupted. It holds her answer to my description of an earlier classroom visit, in which, in front of my class, she remarked on a new student who appeared to be sleeping and was in fact taking notes. On the recording she insists she asked me a question. The recording captures the dispute about the remark, not the remark itself, and an article that blurs that distinction is worth nothing.

And the recording holds the sentence this section exists for. The school, she told me, keeps a record of how many times each teacher calls for an administrator. Her words, from the recording: “when we keep a record of how many times a teacher calls for an administrator.” There was, she said, a high volume of calls from my room, set against a low number of parent contacts logged in Infinite Campus. Calling for help, in that building, was tallied. She relayed the point, attributed to Mr. Nichols, that a teacher loses power when he calls, and later in the meeting she put it in her own voice: “you lose power when you call us.” Tracking calls, criticizing how many calls were made, and punishing a teacher for seeking help are three different claims, and this article keeps them separate. The recording proves the first two in her own words. The third is only the conclusion I drew as the person hearing them.

Her philosophy: contact the parent first, handle it in the hallway, reserve administrators for the big five offenses. I conceded on the spot, and I concede in print, the one point she had right: my parent contacts should have been logged more faithfully. Then I asked her, directly, how she would handle a student who simply refused to move seats. Her answer stayed at the level of that general philosophy. In short, that meeting taught three things: help was counted, asking for help cost a teacher standing, and instead of help, the system above the classroom offered only a standard the teacher would be judged against. She cited TKES Standard 7 at me, positive learning environment, in a conference room with two silent assistant principals. The atmosphere in that room was itself the lesson, and it did not match the positive learning environment she was citing.

Despite our efforts, the Gay-Straight Alliance was never established at Rutland during my four years there. The two teachers and I tried that year and kept trying, for at least three years. The answer was always an approval that had to come from somewhere else: board approval, some approval, an approval that never arrived and never quite got refused. A club I had founded at Central without incident could not be born at Rutland. Miss Van Atta was out of the building within that year, 2022-23, transferred to Central. Mr. Gunter, an ex-Marine whose students adored him, was out the year after, 2023-24, and then out of the district entirely. In my judgment, both were pushed out. That is my judgment of the pattern, not a document I hold, and so is my conclusion about the motive: I believe the principal did not want that club in her school, and the excuses were the method. What is not characterization is the outcome. There was no Gay-Straight Alliance at Rutland High School in my four years there. There was a recorded meeting instead.

There was one more system in that building. Unlike the informal coverage knock on the window, this one was official, written, and hers. At Rutland, to take leave, even for a doctor’s appointment, a teacher did not simply enter the absence in the district’s systems, Frontline and ExecuTime, the way Bibb teachers everywhere else did. On top of the district’s entry sat a building-level gate: a form asking permission, proof attached, at least a week’s notice, and then a wait for Pooler to approve. In my judgment it was ridiculous, insulting and demeaning, the paperwork of children asking to be excused, imposed on professionals with graduate degrees. You will meet another example of the same system later, in a colleague who took the day after a fever off and had a doctor’s note demanded of her, under the same logic: a teacher’s word about her own body was not evidence. Proof was evidence. Permission was the point. The form itself survives, and here it is.

In December 2025 the regime got its fully documented test, and I can walk it almost to the minute, because I worked the problem out in writing at the time. On December 15 my dental office called: a special-ordered crown had arrived. It was finals. On December 17 the students were out at 11:15. My crown installation was at 2:00, a cleaning after it at 4:00, and I needed to leave at 1:30. No substitute was required. No instructional minute would be missed. I handed the form to Ms. Braswell, the school secretary, who warned me, as I reported it at the time, that Pooler did not like short notice. Of course she did not. The regime required a week’s notice, and a crown that arrives on a dental office’s schedule does not consult a principal’s calendar. I emailed Pooler, apologized for the short notice, stated the 1:30 departure and that no instructional time would be lost, and offered a physician’s note on my return. I entered the ninety minutes as sick leave in Frontline and ExecuTime, on top of her form, her proof and her inbox. I recorded my own answer to the question the regime was built to make a teacher ask, what happens if she denies my request: I planned to leave at 1:30 the next day regardless. No denial appears in the record. No reprimand, no deduction, no resolution of any kind; the episode produced paperwork, not punishment. That is precisely the story. A grown professional, in finals week, with no class to cover, had to assemble a permission packet to leave a building ninety minutes early. The point of that system was never to give an answer. The point was to make the teacher ask permission.

Even the ceremonial side ran on forms. In May 2025 an administrative message I kept assigned the faculty a piece of sincerity on deadline: three unique letters to graduating seniors, each at least 175 words, each beginning Dear Hurricane, printed, signed, and delivered to Ms. Braswell by Tuesday at noon. I do not begrudge the students their letters. My point is the assignment’s shape, a heartfelt thing specified to the word count and collected by the secretary. Even goodbye, in that building, was a form with a deadline.

My own department provides a small example of missing support, shown by its place on the organization chart. The foreign language department at Rutland, in practice the Spanish department, two teachers, ever only two of us, was the only department in the building with no department chair. My belief is that the reason was the pay supplement a chair carries, which the school did not want to pay. With no chair, the department sat outside the chairs’ information loop and missed school news and decisions the other departments heard first. Later staffing decisions finished what that slight started. I retired in March 2026 with plenty of notice and was not replaced. The other Spanish teacher working with me at the end left for Houston County in May 2026. By the end of that school year, both of Rutland’s Spanish teachers were gone.

The school’s own Foreign Language page now lists a single teacher where a department used to be. That part-time replacement is a retired Bibb Spanish teacher, called back after at least four years of retirement, probably five or more. That is not a criticism of the man. He came back to help. It is a criticism of a system that let a department of two full-time teachers fall to none, and then asked a retired teacher to hold what was left together on a part-time schedule.

State retirement rules cap how much a pensioned retiree can teach. That cap is the point. Rutland’s entire foreign language offering now rests on a man the state will not allow to work full-time. A school of Rutland’s size, 921 students in 2024-25, should carry at least three full-time language teachers by the standard I would set: enough to teach Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 in full sections, and still offer Spanish 3, Spanish 4, and AP. Rutland now fields half a teacher against that standard. I have called that beyond ridiculous, and I stand by the phrase, because the arithmetic is not close.

The map beyond Rutland is not wider. Central’s own directory lists three world language teachers, two in Spanish and one in French. Howard’s own page lists two, both in Spanish, one of them its department lead. The district’s own guide for 2024-25 offers French and Spanish in person across the district. That two-language, in-person offer is the ceiling for the district as a whole. A school like Rutland should offer more than Spanish alone: French, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, or another modern language in workforce demand. The district, as a whole, does not offer that in person. Anything else comes through Georgia Virtual School, not from a teacher in the building.

There is a second, district-wide reason the chairs would have had little to work with. Bibb County runs a large international teacher pipeline, and the numbers are on the record. Stephanie Hartley, Bibb’s chief communications officer, told The Macon Newsroom on April 30, 2025, that Bibb schools had approximately 395 waiver/emerging educators and 90 international teachers in that academic year, 2024-25. Those two counts may overlap, so they are not added together. The district keeps an International Teachers careers page, and a TPG Cultural Exchange Agreement sits as a public Bibb board attachment, part of the district’s J-1 pipeline. Federal data for fiscal year 2025 shows 41 labor condition applications and 35 approved H-1B petitions for the district, according to MyVisaJobs, and Bibb ranks 15th among U.S. K-12 districts for H-1B teacher approvals.

Washington sets those clocks, not the district, and the clocks are not secret. A J-1 teacher starts with a base period of 3 years. An extension of 1 or 2 years, to a 5-year maximum, is possible, but it is not automatic: the host school must request it. After that, the teacher must reside outside the United States for 2 years before repeating the program. The State Department’s own host letter says the program “is not intended to serve as a pathway to permanent employment.” An H-1B runs up to 3 years plus 3 more, for a 6-year maximum. Every filing step is the employer’s. Past 6 years, a teacher stays only through employer-sponsored permanent residence.

That leaves three choices, and all three belong to the district, not to Washington. The district can request the J-1 extension into years four and five. It can file the H-1B. Or it can start sponsorship toward permanent residence. A district that makes none of those choices has chosen the departure while the paperwork blames Washington. That is the stronger point, and the fairer one. The clock was federal. The choices were local, and doing nothing was still a choice. The filings show the choice the district has made: in the federal sponsorship records, across every year they cover, Bibb has never once petitioned to sponsor one of these teachers for permanent residence.

The district’s international recruiting page lists Math, Science, and Special Education, not world languages. I am not claiming the pipeline staffs language classes specifically. The exposure is structural, and it is easy to see. A language department that lists two or three teachers, as Central and Howard do, has little slack when a clock runs out. Add a department with no chair, no full-time staff, and no tools, and the revolving door is not an abstraction. It is the hiring plan, with a federal clock on it.

Every year, modest requests went in for Spanish materials, books, mostly digital. A colleague asked for Señor Wooly. I asked for a premium dictionary account and other premium Spanish services. The answers were always the same shape: tacit approval, a promise to budget it, and then nothing. Follow-ups were ignored. Not once in 11 years was a request for Spanish actually funded. It was never refused in words. It was agreed to in words and left unfunded. That is death by a thousand shrugs, and it is the same support that was not there in the chair, in the hiring, and in the pipeline.

Support, in this building, did not arrive late. It never arrived. It did not arrive as a chair, as a hire, as a stable pipeline, or as a book.

The last exhibit happened in the fall of 2025, my final year. It is a story about candy, and it is one of the reasons I retired.

At an after-school faculty meeting in the media center, the administration had put assorted candy on the tables. A colleague and I were at a small table by ourselves, joking before the meeting about the table’s single Reese’s cup and how two adults who both loved Reese’s would settle it like civilized people. A giant pumpkin bucket of additional candy sat in the room for anyone who wanted more. (There was, in other words, no shortage of candy. There was only the Reese’s.) A newly hired ROTC instructor walked past our table, looked at us, took the Reese’s off it, and put it in his pocket. I assumed it was a joke. I asked politely, two or three times, for it back. He looked at me as if I were the strange one and kept it. Minutes later, the head coach came to our table and took the rest of our candy, with the same look. I confronted him: put the candy back, she wants it back. He refused, and then he said words to the effect of: let us settle this after school, in the parking lot. I give the words in substance and let the reader weigh them; I heard them, reasonably, as a threat.

A colleague had taken food off my table in front of a room full of professionals and, when I protested, proposed the parking lot. It was thuggish behavior, more befitting a state penitentiary than a school. There was a bucket of candy in that room for the taking. The candy was never the point, and everyone at that table knew it. I wrote an email to Pooler the same day laying out what had happened. She said she had interviewed my colleague, and that my colleague did not think it was that serious. I spoke to my colleague myself. She backed my account and was very upset by the incident. She said the two men claimed they were joking. The parking lot remark, I was told, meant he wanted to discuss it with me. That was the end of the matter as far as I ever learned: I received no further substantive response, and nothing in writing survives for me, because my email lived in my district account and the district deleted that account when I left.

I decided, sitting with that answer, that I could not put up with it anymore. I have weighed that sentence since. A man does not retire over a Reese’s cup. He retires after learning exactly what his safety and his word are worth to the people running his building. A threat reported in writing was closed with a joke defense, a new interpretation of the parking lot remark, and a witness described to me as unbothered even though she was, in fact, bothered. Apply that same answer to every complaint a faculty files over four years, and you have the building’s real discipline policy for adults.

That is support, Bibb County style, as I received it: sideways when it came at all, tallied when I asked for it from above, and, at the end, a shrug over a threat. The next section is about the one time I asked the top of the chart for something small, and what the top did with a teacher’s question.

The Adams File

Part 4 gave you Kevin Adams as a name on a contact line. This is the man who answered me. Adams is the district’s Chief Information Officer, appointed June 16, 2022, after two months as interim. His path to that chair: a 1999 Furman degree in mathematics and computer science, a master’s at the University of Georgia, a specialist degree at Lincoln Memorial, thirteen years teaching math, a middle school principalship, then director of research, evaluation, assessment and accountability. The record I found lists no technology position before this one. His December 2023 profile at CoSN, the school technology leaders’ organization, lists no CETL credential, where peers list one. I do not claim his appointment was improper. I claim it was unexamined. What can be examined is what he did in that job.

Under Policy IFBG, control of the district’s internet filter sits at the district office. A teacher who wants software in her classroom sends it through an approval gate, and what survives goes onto the Digital Resource Catalog. A Bibb teacher does not decide what her students may open. The office does, app by app, and the appeal goes to the same office that closed the gate. I have programmed since I was thirteen and built this website myself; I was not a man outsmarted by his machine.

The first failure was not an app. It was Canvas, the platform every Bibb teacher was required to teach through. I wrote it down in November 2023, as it happened: Canvas had been unusable for me for nearly three months, and the technology office had not fixed it. Canvas’s technical support fixed it, after I went around the district to the vendor.

Then there was Duolingo, and the paper survived, because I kept the whole fight in my files. My students had used Duolingo for five years. On October 4, 2023, it stopped working in my classroom, room 248, blocked by the district’s Chrome security settings, while the same program worked on my own machine. A technician troubleshot my ticket early on. Then it sat for twenty-seven days without resolution, in a school year that did not pause to wait for it. On October 31, Lee Norfleet, Rutland’s media center specialist, escalated it in writing: a ticket entered almost a month earlier had not been addressed, and this teacher was very upset. That same day the office finally contacted Duolingo itself. When action finally came, it was not a repair. It was a decision to deny the app.

The district’s answer survives word for word, because I quoted it in a message to Duolingo’s support team on November 1, 2023: “This app is not being approved due to their current marketing policies and policy regarding third party links. It will have a denied status in the Digital Resource Catalog.” A broken app had become a decision. I appealed on November 27, to Adams and to Susan Jones of teaching and learning. Jones answered the next day with the one useful question, asked after the denial instead of before it: what does Duolingo provide that the district’s adopted curriculum, Vista Higher Learning, does not? Adams’s substantive reply came December 13. He thanked me for my passion and my expertise. He cited a PCWorld article about phishing emails that had used Duolingo’s name. He said other districts were denying the app over targeted advertising. He invoked alignment with 1EdTech, the standards consortium, as part of the ground for the denial. The denial was final. I could tell my students the app might help them on their own time. On December 18 I asked that the schools version, advertising stripped out, be evaluated on its own merits. No reversal came.

About the authority Adams invoked: I did the homework the office did not. Bibb has been a Contributing Member of 1EdTech since 2019, before Adams took the chair. He did not bring the consortium to Bibb. He championed it: in its Annual Report 2022 he called the TrustEd Apps service “an incredible first step to check vetting”. Bibb’s dues came to $16,400 across fiscal 2022 through 2025. The consortium describes its vetting process as a review of an application’s publicly available policy documents against established criteria. It does not independently test how the application actually works. Georgia has held a statewide 1EdTech membership since August 2022, which raises a question nobody downtown has answered: what was Bibb paying for that the state had not already bought? On December 8, 2023, five days before Adams’s letter, I asked 1EdTech what it actually did. Monica Watts, its Senior Director of Learning Innovation, answered the same day that 1EdTech facilitates member access to vetting results and does not engage in the individual rating of applications. That response did not establish that Duolingo was safe or that the district should have approved it. It established a narrower point: 1EdTech had not issued an individual rating of Duolingo that Adams could cite as a reason for denying it. His letter invoked an organization whose assessment did not support the conclusion attributed to it.

Set the failures side by side. A required platform failed for a season and the vendor fixed it. A five-year program broke under the district’s settings, and the office converted the breakage into a denial. Nothing that went wrong in that office ever caused trouble for that office. It caused trouble in room 248, in front of thirty students, at 8 in the morning.

A separate conversation with Adams involved my doctoral studies. Unlike the Duolingo correspondence, this exchange is supported only by my recollection. Adams told me, in conversation, that I did not have permission to do my doctorate and that I had to file the proper paperwork. That is my testimony alone: no recovered message, from any side, mentions my doctorate being challenged, and the district deleted my account when I left. My degree was a research PhD in linguistics from the Inter American University of Puerto Rico, completed in February 2026. It was not a practitioner project studying Bibb County, and nothing in it required the district’s leave to proceed. A teacher who had come to the technology office about a blocked app found himself defending his doctoral research to the technology chief. Two names at the top of Part 4’s chart wrote me back in this episode. One asked a question. One said no.

My verdict on the man: on paper, Adams was courteous, and this section has printed his courtesy where the paper shows it. In the decisions that reached my classroom, his office was slow to repair what it broke, quick to convert a breakage into a denial, and willing to rest that denial partly on an authority that, asked directly, said it had not ruled. When reasons ran out, the answer was authority, and when authority was questioned, the conversation moved to my paperwork. A teacher asked the support system for help with the tools of his trade, and its highest technology official answered a question about software with a conversation about permission the teacher did not owe him.

The Empty Chair

These stories happened inside a pattern that can be measured, and the measurement is worse than the stories. Retention here means the share of a district’s teachers still teaching in that same district the following year, as the Georgia Department of Education’s Educator Pipeline dashboard reports it, not the rosier count of those who return to a classroom somewhere in Georgia. By that honest measure, Bibb loses teachers faster than the state and faster than its neighbors: in 2025 Bibb kept 82 percent of its teachers, and Houston County, twenty minutes down the road, kept 89 percent, same definition, same year, same economy. Bibb sat below the statewide home-district average every year from 2021 through 2025, and in 2023 it collapsed to 75 percent, moving against a rising state trend. A statewide teacher shortage affects every district in Georgia. Bibb loses teachers at a higher rate than the districts around it, and the statewide shortage alone does not explain that difference.

The pay ladder points the same way, and the disadvantage grows the longer a teacher stays. On the published fiscal 2027 schedules, Houston County starts a beginning teacher $1,706.70 ahead of Bibb, and the gap widens with every year of service until, at twenty one years or more with a doctorate, it reaches $11,841.46. A 2027 schedule cannot explain a 2025 resignation, and this article does not ask it to. What it explains is the pay choice that is always available to every experienced Bibb teacher: the longer you have served this district, the more money you can earn by leaving it. Teachers do that arithmetic. It is not advanced mathematics, and neither is the result.

The district’s own commissioned study agrees, in its own cautious way: it put Bibb’s teacher separation rate at 16.8 percent against a national 11.9, in a study the district paid $58,050 to receive, described the management above the classrooms as fragmented, split and uneven, and conceded that the district cannot diagnose why its teachers leave from an exit survey that nine in ten leavers ignore.

Behind those retention figures is a district increasingly reliant on teachers who have not yet completed their certification. The district’s own chief communications officer put the count at about 395 emerging educators working in Bibb’s buildings in 2024-25, teachers hired under the state’s strategic waiver while they complete certification, alongside about 90 international teachers counted the same year. A district that cannot keep its veterans staffs its classrooms with beginners on waivers, and beginners, in every study the district has ever paid for, are the teachers most likely to leave. The waiver is not a temporary bridge over the empty chair problem. Increasingly, it is a permanent part of the staffing.

What the numbers cannot show you is a face. Let me give the empty chair three of them.

The first belongs to a colleague at Rutland, a genuinely decent one in a building that did not specialize in decency. About a year before I retired, she woke one morning sick with a fever. The building’s protocol for a sick teacher was to notify the principal, and she followed it to the letter: she texted Pooler at least three times, four by her count. No response. She emailed. No response. She reached the school secretary, who told her to come down in person at her break or lunch and explain. So a teacher with a fever stood in the office and explained that she was sick and needed to go home, and the answer she got, as she relayed it to me, was this: well, are you dying? Because if you are not dying, I think you can stay until the end of the day. She was not permitted to leave before 3:00, though the students were gone by 2:35. She took the next day off, as sick people do, and a doctor’s note was then required of her. She no longer teaches in Bibb County. She stays unnamed here, because her consent to be named has not been asked for, and this article does not spend a colleague’s name without it. But the checkable shape of the story needs no one’s permission: a good teacher asked her principal for one sick day’s grace, was asked if she was dying, and now works somewhere else. The retention gap has a face, even when the face is not named.

The second face belongs to a young science teacher at Rutland, and she gets no name here, because she asked for nothing and I am not spending her privacy to make my point. She taught two years. In my judgment she had everything: natural authority in a classroom, the respect of students and colleagues, the thing you cannot train into a person. She broke up a student fight and was injured doing it, and received, in my observation, very little sympathy afterward from the administration of her building. She confided in me, in her own words, that she could not stand the principal, and she told me she was leaving because of her. She left in March 2026, the same month I retired. She did not transfer to Houston. She did not transfer anywhere. After two years, she quit teaching entirely. She is not another district’s gain. She is the profession’s loss. The district’s subject numbers belong to a different year, and I keep them in their own frame: Bibb’s subject-level retention for 2025 puts science at 67.92 percent, among the worst in the district, roughly one in three science teachers not returning to Bibb County that year. Her March 2026 exit is not inside that figure. An annual retention number does not even see a mid-year exit like hers, which is its own quiet indictment of the instrument.

The third face is a pattern, and it is the one I lived. In four years at Rutland I watched an extremely high number of teachers leave every year, including my first year there. I do not have the exact statistics, and this article does not pretend I do, because the statistic that would settle it, retention school by school, is one the district holds and does not publish. What I have is what the faculty had: the experience, repeated until it became the building’s climate, of getting to know somebody and finding them gone the next year. Colleagues said it to me in those words, year after year. That is not a statistic. It is what it feels like, from inside the building, when the statistic that would settle the question is not published, and the district could refute it tomorrow by publishing the number. It does not.

The students saw the empty chairs too. In the public record of Rutland’s own community, a former student describes hearing a math teacher tell her class she would leave at year’s end because of the principal. A former student describes two years of high school with no math teacher, other math teachers volunteering to help and not being allowed to, and students who asked for a teacher being told they did not care about their education. Those are student voices, paraphrased and scrubbed, from a public thread, labeled as what they are. Put them beside the science figure and my own experience in the hallways, and they stop sounding like isolated grievances. They sound like a regular pattern. A school that cannot keep teachers cannot keep promises. The musical chairs reached the front office too: both assistant principals who served my final year at Rutland were out of their chairs within months. One had arrived the year before and was gone in a single year; the other, an assistant principal since 2017, now works down the hall as the school’s family engagement coordinator. Their replacements were announced on June 18, 2026. Why does everyone around Wendy Pooler come and go so quickly, at every level of the building?

I wrote about this before the series began, in “12 Reasons Why Teachers are Quitting and How to Keep Them in the Classroom.” Bibb is living the local version of that same list.

Before the accounts are settled, this article owes the reader the answer to the question hanging over every section so far: if the building was like this, why did anybody stay, and what was I still doing in a classroom in year eleven? The honest answer starts with a confession about the kind of teacher I was. I was strong on content and I made engaging lessons, and students said, and I believed them, that I was a good teacher. I was not, and am not, strong interpersonally in the way the profession’s posters imagine. I remember faces. Names are nearly impossible for me. A student can sit in my room for a year, and years later I will know his face in a grocery store line and be unable to produce his name to save my life. What I had instead was a life the students found interesting, and a willingness to let them into it.

My students were fascinated by my years in Japan, and the fascination ran, more than through anything I assigned, through anime and manga. They asked me everything. What do people earn there. What do they eat. How does school work there, and I would explain the 6-3-3 ladder and the fork in it between the academic high schools and the trade and vocational ones. But the strongest pull was the language itself. How do you say good morning. How do you say thank you. In my Spanish classroom, Macon teenagers begged their teacher for a third language, and I gave it to them, gladly, off the clock of any pacing guide ever written.

One of them asked me to teach him some Japanese words, and I taught the class two good ones. The first was gomasuri (ごますり). The gesture goes with it, one palm open, the other hand in a fist, rubbing in a circle, grinding sesame. In Japan it means polishing the apple: brown-nosing, flattery with a shine on it, the full production. The second was urusai (うるさい), which means loud, noisy, and delivered in the right tone means shut up. That boy spent nearly the rest of the year switching between the two, deploying both wherever they did not belong. A classmate would get sassy, or sarcastic, or just funny, and he would point, very solemn, and announce: gomasuri. Somebody else would get loud and out came urusai. Then he would nod and smile at me. It had almost nothing to do with the meanings, and it was the funniest thing in my school day. I laughed every single time he did it. I doubt many of my students remember much Spanish. I can be almost one hundred percent certain every one of them remembers what gomasuri and urusai mean.

Then there were the lessons no Bibb curriculum contained and no administrator ever reviewed, because I taught them on my own authority, in the margins, on purpose. I taught my students what an index fund is, to start a Roth IRA early and put the maximum in every year, and what a dividend is and why a paycheck is not the only way money arrives. Some of them were enthralled, because no teacher had ever mentioned stocks to them at all. I taught them about CLEP examinations, the tests that let a student earn real college credit for what he already knows, and I add a disclosure a careful reader deserves: my own store now sells CLEP study material, years after I taught this in that classroom. I took the tests myself as a high school student and banked free credits, and when I raised the subject with my seniors I found that, of the ones I asked, none knew the program existed. In August 2025 I proposed fixing that inside the school’s own machinery: an advisement lesson, handouts, ten or twelve minutes to tell every senior in the building that free college credit had a door and where it was. I do not claim the building took me up on it. I claim the simpler thing: I looked at what my students did not know about money and college, judged that the system was not going to tell them, and told them myself. That, as much as any verb chart, is what my classroom was for, and it is why this article is an indictment of a system and not a confession that the years were wasted. They were spent, by me and by the teachers in these sections, in rooms the system above us had largely stopped entering.

The Mirage, From Inside the Room

Part 3 of this series, The Graduation Mirage, set two numbers side by side: about 89 percent of Bibb students graduate, and about 23 percent are proficient. I will not relitigate it; the record is here for any reader who wants it: https://gwmac.com/bibb-county-schools-the-graduation-mirage-89-graduate-23-proficient/ This section asks what that gap feels like from the teacher’s side of the desk.

Start with the mechanism a student in the public thread already handed us. A class of seniors spent the first two months of the school year with no math teacher. They were placed on Edgenuity, the credit-bearing online program, and by the student’s account they finished the course and passed the exam. Then a teacher was hired. The completed coursework was discarded, and the class restarted from the beginning, as if nothing had been learned or earned. Consider what that sequence teaches, because students learn the system’s lessons more reliably than the curriculum’s. It teaches that credit flows from seat time and administrative convenience, not from demonstrated learning, since the demonstrated learning was thrown out. It teaches that the diploma at the end of the process is determined by scheduling, not learning. When students can earn credit without consistently demonstrating proficiency, they have less incentive to treat genuine learning as necessary for graduation.

Credit recovery raises a related concern: students may earn the credits needed for graduation without mastering all the material those credits are meant to represent. I describe this from my experience as a teacher, not from a districtwide audit of individual courses. A student who has failed a course, or in the vacancy cases never truly been taught it, is routed into a compressed online track, where the semester’s content is re-presented in a form designed to be completed. Some students in recovery work honestly and learn real things, and I taught students I was proud of in exactly those circumstances. But the design tells on itself. This is my argument, not a document: the recovery track exists to return the student to the graduation cohort on schedule. The credit is what that track is required to deliver. Proficiency is not what anyone in that room is required to deliver. Meanwhile students reach a high school classroom years behind the level the course assumes, carrying credits that certify exposure rather than mastery, and the teacher is left to deal with the difference between what the transcript says and what the student actually knows. The teacher’s part in the mirage is to be the only person in the building who must face both numbers at once, every day, in the faces of thirty students.

The mirage has a human face in the public record, and it predates the petition by more than a year. In a public post in August 2023, Kaytlynn Epps wrote about her cousin, a seventeen year old senior from a military family who moved back to Georgia for his senior year at Rutland. At enrollment, by the family’s account, Pooler accepted only five of his credits, told him he would not graduate until he was twenty one, and advised a GED instead of a diploma. Epps wrote that the same thing had happened to her about two years earlier, when she sought to re-enroll after online school: she was advised toward a GED, took the advice, and still resents being talked out of a normal high school experience. Those are the family’s claims, printed as the family’s. Her question in the post is the mirage’s question, asked from the other side of the desk: how many people have to complain before someone listens?

A district can print 89 percent on a banner. It cannot print what the students in those rooms learned about what their credits were worth. They learned it anyway.

Other Voices

The district’s cheapest answer to everything above is one word long: disgruntled. One man, one building, one retirement with an axe in it. So this section exists, and its method goes on the record before its contents do. The accounts below were gathered from public posts and public comments in public community groups, and from a public petition page. No closed group was read or joined; the private teacher groups where the venting concentrates were not accessed. Several of the voices here are named, because they posted under their own names in public. Others are identified only by their own self-descriptions. I present these statements as personal accounts published online, not as independently verified findings. I do not claim the chorus is representative. I claim it exists, in public, saying in chorus much of what I have said in solo. A solo can be dismissed as temperament. A chorus has to be answered as evidence, and this one has not been.

First, the faculty end of it, because it sounds like my own career read back to me. A woman who describes herself as a teacher of forty years in the Bibb County School District, fully retired as of this past May, answered a public post about central office salaries. She defended building administrators, the ones on the front lines, as earning their pay. Her indictment was aimed upstairs: the district is way too top heavy, and the mandates that flow down from the central office are unrealistic and unmanageable because the people issuing them are out of touch with today’s classroom climate. She closed by saying her teacher’s heart could not take another year. Beside her, a current Bibb teacher, responding to the published central office salary list, wrote the shortest review the district has ever received: “I do not know half of the people on this list.” Other commenters described teachers begging on Facebook for classroom supplies and paying out of their own pockets for materials to make the district’s own curriculum work. The pattern is not that the central office does nothing. It is that what the central office produces arrives in classrooms as extra costs.

Then there is how the district treats its own on the way out. A commenter who describes herself as a twelve year Board of Education employee wrote that she was terminated after exceeding her FMLA time, that her resignation letter was written for her, and that it came with an $800 fine for breaking her contract. That account is specific and falsifiable, and it is hers, presented as she presented it.

Parents carry the Rutland end of the chorus, and their testimony keeps acquitting the teachers. One parent whose family left Bibb for a neighboring county after twenty years in south Bibb praised Rutland’s amazing teachers and staff, who would give the world for those kids, and named the school’s real problem as safety and trust, noting that a petition had sought the principal’s removal. Another wrote that an emailed concern to the Rutland principal received no response and no call back. Even the district’s critics, at the building level, draw the line the forty year teacher drew: the people in the classrooms are not the failure they are describing.

The building’s leadership created its own public record, which this article did not create. On October 22, 2024, a petition appeared on Change.org under the title Demand Rutland High School’s Principal Mrs. Pooler to Step Down. Its stated grounds, in its own framing, were allegations of racism and a failure to provide a safe and equal environment; I report the petition’s charges as the petition’s charges. The Macon Telegraph covered it and reported over 450 signatures as of November 13, 2024. On November 21, 2024, a complaint hearing concerning the principal was held at the Board of Education building, in two sessions, to hear complaints from parents and students, and the Telegraph covered that too. The petition page has since displayed 740 verified signatures, the count as I read it on October 25, 2026. In its comment feed, eighty one text comments, the dominant themes were favoritism toward the principal’s daughters, their friends, and athletes; dress code enforcement perceived as unequal; students removed or sent to SOAR Academy; and parents unable to get meetings, callbacks, or responses. Two of the eighty one defended her, one a former teacher who called the feed a mob mentality gossip board, one a parent who said she was not that bad and that he came to respect her. I record the dissenters because a chorus that includes its minority voices is more trustworthy than one that has been scrubbed clean.

The longest and most specific voice in that public record belongs to a former student, and she gets the center of this section because she earned it the hard way: by writing it all down. Madison Tidwell Coley, Rutland class of 2021, posted her account in the November 2024 thread about the petition. She opened it this way: “I almost didn’t post on this thread because it’s been three years since I last had to encounter the terrors of Dr. Pooler.” She posted anyway, she said, because Pooler seemed to still be on the same power trip. Her junior and senior years were significantly affected by COVID. Despite being let back into in person school, with sporting events occurring at school every week, her senior class was denied traditional senior activities like homecoming, and, in her words, they were told very early on that “prom probably wasn’t an option.” She is not a disinterested witness, and this article does not present her as one: the activities at the center of her account were activities she organized herself. Howard and Central, she wrote, were planning their homecomings while Rutland’s principal had no intention of making the senior year special. All her class wanted, she wrote, was modest: “We simply wanted a homecoming queen and king to be named at the football game that was already happening.”

So she organized senior activities herself, including a homecoming court vote in which, by her account, over 80 percent of the school participated, buying the sashes and crowns with her own money. On the day of the homecoming game, after school, she says Pooler obtained her personal phone number from another student and called to tell her she was banned from all football games, including that night’s, for a “level 4” offense tied to the activities she had organized. The offense, she says, never appeared in writing anywhere; I print that as her claim about the specific offense and the notice she received. Pooler said she would contact her parents, she says, and never did. You will remember the philosophy Pooler stated to me on tape: contact the parent first. Madison’s account says that was not done for her. I state the juxtaposition; I do not claim it as proof. She says she still has a recording of that phone call. That is her statement of possession; the recording has not been heard or authenticated by this article. Her classmates wore the homecoming sashes to the game and held up pictures of her face with the words “Free Madison” on them. She says she still managed a peek at the game despite the ban, so no reader should picture a completed exclusion from the grounds that night. About six months later, parents rented an off campus venue and held a prom themselves, because the school would not. A senior class organized its own homecoming, and its parents organized its prom, in a building whose principal is paid to organize a school. That is my summary of her account, which is hers from start to finish, and it needs no motive assigned to anyone to land.

Three more named voices from the same thread, each in one breath. Trinity Taylor, class of 2024, says Pooler summoned her to the atrium with an assistant principal, read her email to the superintendent back to her word for word, and warned her of consequences if she sent another like it. Samantha Hedges, a parent of two Rutland students, says her younger son was held for over an hour after being pulled from a metal detector line over an alleged marijuana smell, that Pooler conceded she had not smelled it on him, and that he willingly emptied his pockets and bag and nothing was found. Jeremy Wilder, a student from 2017 to 2021, says a teacher told him she was leaving that year because of Pooler. Those are their accounts, in public, under their own names.

One detail remains, and I state it as a finding about the public record and nothing more. Across two sweeps of that public material, not one direct complaint post from a Rutland teacher naming the principal could be found. Parents talked. Students talked. Alumni talked. The teachers of Rutland High School, in public, said nothing at all that my research could locate. I draw no conclusion from that silence here. The section about the door has already told you what the building’s teachers told me in private, with their permission where it was needed. This section’s job was narrower: to show that the man telling you these stories is not the only voice in the county telling them.

Professor Winston Wants to Know

Before the bill arrives, Professor Winston would like a show of hands on one question: should Bibb County Schools publish teacher retention school by school every year?

Professor Winston Wants to Know

Our resident watchdog is taking the temperature of the room.

Should Bibb County Schools publish teacher retention school by school every year?

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Should Bibb County Schools publish teacher retention school by school every year?

Yes, every school, every yearDistrictwide numbers onlyNo, it would be unfair to individual schoolsNot sure

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The Bill Comes Due

Five parts in, all the accounts are settled in the same room. Here is a brief tally, because the cost of every number in this series was always going to be borne in a classroom. Part 1 followed the money and found a district pleading poverty at the top of a $15 million deficit conversation. Part 2 followed the vendors and found Kelly Services paid $17.9 million across fiscal 2022 to 2025, by the state’s own payment records, for substitute and temporary staffing, and a fill rate, the number that would tell you how often a class actually got a teacher, published nowhere. In Rutland’s math rooms, by the students’ own public accounts, the answer in some years was no teacher at all. Part 3 followed the results and found the mirage. Part 4 followed the chart and found fourteen chairs at the top, one known competitive search among them, and six-figure pay records up from 99 to 136 in three years. Part 5 followed the people.

Now the honest sorting, because this article ends the way it began, with its evidence grades on the table. Established by the record: the retention gap against Houston County on the same definition and the Bibb series below the state band in every year measured; a pay ladder that falls further behind with every year of service; waiver staffing at a scale of hundreds in the buildings; and a district-commissioned study putting Bibb’s teacher separation above its national benchmark. Established by testimony, mine and others’: support that could not help and sometimes did not try; a first week spent on pageantry while classrooms waited; a building where help was tallied, complaints were described back to the complainant inaccurately, and a reported threat was closed as a joke; and a faculty assembled at a glass door, afraid of a clock. Not established, and not claimed anywhere in this article: a Bibb departure split by reason, Bibb discipline rates, a measured share of the retention gap attributable to management, and any school-by-school retention figure, because the district does not publish one. The argument of causation is this article’s argument, and I own it as argument. The gaps in the record are the district’s gaps.

Which brings the series to its demands, deliberately small, specific, and answerable, because a district that cannot be embarrassed by a large demand can still be cornered by a small one. Publish the teacher retention rate for every school in the district, every year, calculated from the personnel records the district already holds. Publish or calculate the substitute fill rate under the Kelly contract, from the contract’s own placement records, so the public can learn how often a Bibb classroom that loses its teacher gets one. Publish the exit survey results, from the responses the district already collects, in a form a departing teacher might recognize as worth answering. Publishing those records would subject the district’s staffing problems and administrative decisions to closer public scrutiny. Every other number in this series I had to dig out of state dashboards, audited reports, and payment databases. The three that would help the public understand why teachers leave are the three the district has not put into public form.

I end where this article began, at the glass door at the front of Rutland High School as it was in my years there, 2:55 on a school day. The series has now attached its numbers to that door: 82 percent against 89, a ladder $11,841.46 short at its top rung, $17.9 million spent on substitute and temporary staffing with no published fill rate, about 395 waiver or emerging educators working in the buildings in the reported year, and a faculty watching the second hand, waiting for 3:00 to release people who arrived before 7:00 without being asked and will go home to finish the day’s work without being paid. The door is not a metaphor the district can argue with. It was a daily, observable fact of one of its buildings.

The money was there. The teachers were there. One of those statements stopped being true every spring. The districtwide losses are in the state data for anyone to read. What the district will not publish is the rate school by school, and the classrooms of Bibb County are where that loss lands.

The ledgers close in a room, and so does this article, but that room deserves to have its last scene told in full, because my exit from it is the one piece of evidence in this series I have not yet laid on the table. My final working day was March 3, 2026. I state the date the way this article states everything, with its papers in order: on March 2, in a message I wrote at the time about an unrelated matter, I called the next day my official retirement day from the Bibb County School District. My employment on the district’s books ran to May 27, 2026, and I drew that distinction myself, in my own correspondence with the benefits office: final working day March 3, last day of employment May 27. The classroom ended on the third.

My original plan was to tell no one. I would clear my room quietly, in little pieces, and the next morning my students would walk in and I would simply be gone, a vacancy with a substitute standing in it, the way teachers vanish in that district every spring. About three or four days before the end, I reversed it. I told my students, in no uncertain terms, that I was leaving and why. It’s not you, I told them. I love you guys. Some of them were shocked, above all that it was March, the middle of everything, and their question has stayed with me because it is the question this whole article answers from the other side: why can’t you stay until the end of the year? I explained that I just couldn’t. I was done. I did not tell my students how severely the thought of continuing to work there was affecting me. Every Sunday night of that final stretch I had faced what teachers call the Sunday night dreads, and in my case the phrase is too gentle: it was something close to a panic attack at the thought of going in on Monday. The idea of continuing to May did not tire me. It terrified me. A man does not leave a classroom in March over a schedule or a bathroom. He leaves when the dread of the building has followed him home and taken over his Sundays, and the district that employed him for eleven years could not tell you the exact day it happened, because the district never asked.

Underneath the dread was the thing I had watched damage the job from inside, and I will state it as my testimony and my opinion, because after eleven years of producing the numbers I have earned both labels. In that system, data is a magic word. Say it in a meeting and heads nod; build a dashboard and the year is a success. But too much of that data, in my testimony and my opinion, is false data, meaningless data, because in that environment it is almost impossible to collect accurate data. You become so focused on looking at the data that you forget the students you are actually teaching. I fed that machine for eleven years: the lesson plans written to its template, the goals locked into its platform, the growth measures declared accurate by memo over classrooms where accuracy had no working definition. A teacher can survive being measured. What he cannot survive, not for long, is being measured by numbers he knows are fiction, in a building that has stopped asking whether they describe anything real. More than any single confrontation or school policy, the relentless emphasis on data I considered unreliable contributed to the dread I felt each Sunday before returning to work.

As I prepared to retire, I wanted to ensure my students could continue learning after I left. I prepared substitute materials because I had seen no clear plan from the school for how my classes would continue. In my last weeks I built the thing my replacement would need, because the district’s own preparations for my classroom’s future were not visible to me. My long-term substitute, I had every reason to believe, would not speak Spanish and might not have access to technology, so I made the handover old school and paper based: printable lessons and handouts, explanations and workbook activities, one set for Spanish 1 and another for Spanish 2, built on where my students actually stood, chapter 12 of the Busuu sequence they had been working through and checkpoint 5 of the SpanishDict modules. I drafted a note to Mrs. Freeman, the school academic coach, seeking advice on those sub plans.

She never answered. I sent at least three emails about those plans, and copies of the plans themselves went to Pooler and the assistant principals as well. Not one reply came back from any of them. One line would have done it: thank you, that will not be necessary, we are going to use Edgenuity. It never came. I later learned that none of my plans were used. My classes were put on Edgenuity instead, the easy path, and in my judgment my students learned no Spanish for the rest of that year, though the plans I had built for them, lessons written for exactly where they stood, sat ready and unused. That work survives in drafts from those weeks, in my own contemporaneous words, and I set it down here not as a boast but as a measurement. The teacher was planning for his students’ spring. Now judge the building by the same standard.

I had emailed Pooler that March 3 would be my last day, giving, as I recall it, two or three weeks of notice. The interval is my recollection; the email went from my district account, and the district deleted that account when I left. For several days, nothing. Then a reply arrived, one line in substance, and I give it at the grade of my recollection of its wording: thank you for letting me know. After that, silence of a completeness I had not thought administratively possible. She never made eye contact with me again. She never wished me well. She never thanked me for my years of service: eleven years in the district, four of them in her building, ended with one line and averted eyes. I would see her in the building and she would behave as though I were not there.

My colleagues, the ones who said anything, said the thing that tells you what the 82 percent in this article is made of. I’m so jealous, they told me. I wish I was going with you. I wish I could do this. I record their envy for what it was. Those were the goodbyes of people who could not afford to leave themselves. The retention rate this article has spent its length dissecting does not measure loyalty, or satisfaction, or belief. In my building it largely measured who could afford to leave.

I cleared the room the way I had planned to, little by little, over several days, nothing heavy, except one object, and the article can end on it because no summary I own is truer. In my last year or two, the building banned teachers from keeping small refrigerators in their classrooms. I like cold drinks, and yogurt, and snacks through a long day, so I kept a little mini fridge in my room anyway, hidden, for two years. I was a rule breaker. I’ll freely admit it. On my last day I dragged that fridge out of its hiding place and carried it through the building in plain sight, proudly. It was contraband the size of a dormitory appliance, carried out of a school that had counted my calls for an administrator, rationed my bathroom breaks, timed my lunch, required a permission form for my dentist visit, and finally answered my eleven years with one line and no eye contact. What were they going to do about it now. Nothing at all, which was, in the end, the building’s answer to everything I ever brought it. I left that school for the last time a retired man, carrying the one piece of evidence I never had to label.

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