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Thanks to distance learning programs becoming more and more common the kinds of online degrees you can find today are much more diverse than ever before. There are many online universities to choose from as well, so you can make sure that your online university offers what you are looking for ahead of time, like an online special education degree for those who want.
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Back on October 30, 2006 a teacher and the principal at Lewisville Elementary were suspended with pay while they were investigated.  I originally posted about it here and I’ve updated the post several times since then.  At the beginning of the new year the principal, Mr. Rash, was reinstated with his pocket a little lighter (10 days of his suspension was unpaid) and today (January 17, 2007) the teacher, Mr. Snow was reinstated in full.  I should point out that Mr. Rash was suspended because of how he originally handled the allegations against Mr. Snow, thus the unpaid part of his suspension, and Mr. Snow was suspended due to the allegations for which he has now been cleared.

The image above is a scan of the letter that the school system sent home with the students today (click on it to enlarge) and this followed a late automated call from the school superintendent last night.  That call was made because the father of the child who made the accusations showed up at the Board of Education last night and during the public part of the meeting complained that Mr. Snow was going to be reinstated. From the article about it in the Winston-Salem Journal:

An angry parent
confronted members of the Forsyth County school board in a meeting last night after he learned that school officials planned to return a
teacher who was investigated by the sheriff’s office to the classroom
this week.

"What concerns me
greatly is I learned of this decision via the grapevine," said the parent, whose child is a student at Lewisville Elementary School and
one of the children involved in the misconduct allegations against the
science teacher, Alan Snow. The Winston-Salem Journal is not
identifying the parent in order protect the identity of the child.

The parent said he
is concerned that he might not have enough time to prepare his family for the teacher’s return if it happened as quickly as school-system
officials told him that it could.

Superintendent Don
Martin and school-board chairman Donny Lambeth interrupted the father
a few minutes after he began speaking during the meeting.

Martin also
approached the father in the auditorium after the meeting ended and chastised him for talking about the case during an open session,
telling him that doing so could create more publicity before parents
could be advised about the teacher’s status.

The parents of the
child involved in the case met privately with the school system’s attorneys and other officials after the public meeting.

Martin updated the
school board on the case during a closed session last night, but he said later that no decision has been made about whether Snow can return
to teaching.

In his letter to the parents Superintendent Martin expressed regret that the investigation by the Sheriff’s and District Attorney’s offices took so long and that he appreciated the parents’ and Mr. Snow’s patience in the matter.  I’d say the least they should be is appreciative.  The man lived through the holidays with this hanging over his head and he’s been in limbo for close to 90 days and that’s simply unacceptable to me.

In a comment posted a couple of days ago on my original post a person going by the moniker P. Smith made some interesting comparisons between Mr. Snow’s case and the Duke Lacrosse case.  In the first paragraph of that comment he/she wrote the following:

Some interesting comparisons to what happened at Duke and the case in
Lewisville–an allegation from an unreliable witness–in this case a
teacher with a vendetta against another teacher. Sounds like the
science teacher is coming back to Lewisville after a thorough
investigation which found no wrong doing on him. Now, the question is:
what happens to someone who makes up a story to "get back at another
person"?

Until now I’ve only heard about a student making an allegation against Mr. Snow, but P. Smith seemed to know about Mr. Snow being cleared at least a day before it became a news item which leads me to believe he/she is tapped into the "grapevine" that the student’s dad referred to in the Journal article, and so I’m wondering which teacher the grapevine is saying had it out for Mr. Snow.

Now comes the truly hard part for the school.  Mr. Snow is an incredibly popular teacher with many students and parents and I have a feeling that there are going to be some festering wounds left by this experience.  I can only imagine what Mr. Snow is feeling these days, and he will be a larger man than most of us if he is able to return to school and not harbor some serious animosity towards those who were ready to believe the worst. (Speaking of which, to this date no one has said what Mr. Snow was accused of, so everyone was left to imagine the worst).  And I’m sure that there will be many members of the Lewisville community wondering what the consequences should be for those who filed the allegations against Mr. Snow.  There will also be those wondering if Mr. Snow has grounds for a civil case against his accuser’s family and there may even be those who will push him to sue.  Finally, I’m sure there are plenty of people who know who made the accusations and I’m willing they won’t be too shy about sharing that knowledge.  All of this can spell serious trouble for the school’s community, and I guess the best we can hope for at this point is that we keep the kids out of the fray as much as possible.  That’s something about which I’m sure everyone can agree.

As for the school system I think they have to seriously re-think some of their policies.  When I talked to the Assistant Superintendent for Lewisville, a very nice lady named Charlene Davis, she emphasized to me that if they are going to err it is going to be on the side of protecting the children.  I’m all for that, but I think they can do so without killing a teacher’s career.  For instance, I see no reason to make the teacher’s name public until there’s sufficient evidence or reason to do so.  Sure we the parents will probably know what’s going on, but in the Google Age the accusations will live long and spread far whether they’re founded or not.  Let’s put it this way; if Mr. Snow decides to leave town and start fresh somewhere else he’ll probably be checked out by all potential employers and if they type his name into a search engine what do you think will pop up?  What are the chances they’ll see the article about the allegations and then stop looking before they get to the articles about his being cleared?

What I mentioned to Ms. Davis is that they could have protected the kids by removing Mr. Snow from the classroom and they could have protected Mr. Snow by saying that he was on a temporary assignment with the school system, or that he was taking a leave of absence.  Whatever, as long as they don’t make public that a teacher is being investigated until they have solid evidence that something’s going on then I think they’ll be doing a lot better.

Another issue they need to work on is communication.  They definitely did a better job once enough parents complained about not knowing what was going on, but they need to have a communication process already planned out for instances like this.  By not communicating effectively they let the grapevine or rumor mill do the communicating for them and that helps no one.

**Update 1/22/07** In the Sunday, January 21, 2007 Winston-Salem Journal columnist Scott Sexton had the following in his piece:

The man wanted to know
whether school officials were about to put a teacher who had been
investigated on sexual-abuse allegations involving his son back into
the classroom Thursday morning. If so, he wanted to know why he and his
wife had not been told about it.

and

Dealing with sex-abuse
allegations is difficult for all parties. The parents ride an emotional
roller coaster, and the teacher, whose livelihood and reputation are at
stake, goes through hell, too. Investigators have to tread lightly when
interviewing a child, and school officials must work hard to balance
the serious nature of the accusations with the rights of their employee.

As far as I know this is the first time that the specific allegations against Mr. Snow have been made public and I’ve emailed Mr. Sexton to see if he’ll share where he heard those specific allegations.  Was it at the board meeting (did the father blurt it out during the public session) or did he get it in private from the family or from a school official?  And no matter the source, why specify the charges now that Mr. Snow has been cleared and after everyone (including his own paper) had been so careful to avoid publicly airing the specific allegations?

To sum up I can only say that I hope that Mr. Snow can find peace back at school, the Lewisville community can somehow patch the wounds of this event and the school system can learn from its mistakes before more careers are jeopardized.  As for the child and his family, I don’t know them (don’t want to know who they are) and I only hope that they somehow find whatever help they need.