Lawrence, KS Fires Teacher for Conservative Views, but Backs Down

Tim Latham is a history and government teacher in Lawrence, KS with over 15 years teaching experience. This was his first year at Lawrence High School and looked to be his last. He was popular and inspired indifferent students to want to learn history and government. Latham emphasized that he wanted to encourage youngsters to love their country and the American way of life.

And that was part of Tim Latham's problem...he's an apple pie conservative American in a liberal profession among many who blame the country for everything wrong in the entire world. Their motto might as well be, "Blame America first." With a McCain Palin bumper sticker on his car and a website that was "too patriotic" in the eyes of some administrators Tim Latham found that his contract wasn't going to be renewed. It looked like he would be one more casualty of the "tolerant" liberal left.

But that's not the end of the story.

Several of Mr. Latham's students started a Facebook page, Save Mr. Latham, that garnered 2,000 members within just a few days, many of them students at the high school. Latham also appeared on FOX telling his story and received thousands of emails and Facebook messages, one from as far away as China. Several students, having learned how the system works from Mr. Latham, decided to act and testified before the local school board about how their teacher made them excited about what they expected to be a boring subject. They didn't want to see the school fire a gifted and charimatic teacher. They expressed their views articulately before the board.

To make a long story short, Mr. Latham has a new contract for the upcoming school year. The administration failed even to meet the requirements in their contract with the union for reviewing a teacher's classes before dismissal. In the agreement between Mr. Latham and the school, the biased administrator who thought he was "too patriotic" is prohibited from reviewing his classes.

Keep your eyes on this one. There's more than one way for a liberal to undermine and destroy someone he doesn't like. And there's always next year. Pray for Mr. Latham. We need men like him in education, especially for boys being raised by single moms. Good strong male role models are in short supply and blessed is the young man who has one.