Bennett Kayser

by smf for 4LAKids

This originally appeared in the Sunday, May 24, 2015  It's complicated  edition of the 4LAKids blog/e-newsletter

Former UTLA President Warren Fletcher read it verbatim at the June 23rd Board of Ed  meeting and I was asked to republish it.  Warren apologized for “plagiarizing”, though he quoted me as the author.  But no apology is ever needed. As a screenwriter I have always written words for others to say. 

It sounded good Warren – and thank you.

But mostly Thank You Bennett!

 

BENNETT KAYSER is one of the most decent men I have ever met – and a good friend to me and kids and parents and teachers and public education.

There is a crazy selflessness that afflicts middle school educators like a mutant gene: ‘Who, in their right mind, would return there?’ Bennett possesses this in spades.

The victory-at-all-costs campaign waged against him was particularly brutal and unnecessarily hurtful to him, his wife Peggy and his friends, colleagues and family.

‘It’s not personal, it’s politics’ is easy to say and tougher to live.

Forgiveness+forgetting will be harder to come by from his friends than from Bennett.

“A righteous man does not conceive of himself as righteous; he is ‘only doing what anyone else would do,’ except, of course, that no one else does it.” ― Martin Berman-Gorvine, 36