Class, Coffee, & Confrontation

Working under an egotistical leader who places blame for all that is wrong on everyone else. Watching as change is enacted to shake up the status quo. Seeing the results of a world where facts don't matter. Experienced veterans questioning how far to go to oppose the leader and when extreme behavior might be justified. Sound familiar? Political?Could this occur in what was once a haven for freedom and debate?Class, Coffee, and Confrontation takes you inside Bantamville South High where Kassi Stanton, a veteran English/Language Arts teacher, struggles with forces that threaten to take down her and public education. The terror of a recurring nightmare before the first day of school is amped up this year when new principal Rikki Parks, with a questionable past in other schools, takes the helm of BS High. A bomb threat, a concerned newspaper photographer, and a love triangle fill out the first week of school. The story follows Kassi as she grapples with the three elements that inspire the title. She teaches students in a school system where data has a higher priority than learning and in a culture where terrorism in the form of bomb threats intrudes on the school building, once considered a safe place (CLASS). She navigates relationships with colleagues who run the gamut from supportive friends to self-absorbed opportunists (COFFEE). And she deals with administrators who are threatening, incompetent, or both (CONFRONTATION). A series of issues lead Kassi to question remaining in teaching. One concerns the school's safety procedures that are questioned by the local SWAT team as counterproductive. During a meeting discussing the weaknesses of the program, one teacher suggests arming the staff. Another involves a principal who waves her carte blanche from the school board to threaten her staff with transfer or termination if they do not cooperate with her ideas for raising the school's ranking. A third entangles her in the romantic relationships and break-ups of teachers from her own English/Language Arts team and a confusing relationship of her own in which she finds herself the victim of a friend she tries to help. The conflicts ramp up when bomb threats are made on three different occasions. At the same time, Principal Parks continues to create an environment of fear, and Kassi sees similarities to characters in literature like Odysseus and Cyclops in The Odyssey. She steps forward to question the administrator's treatment of her staff and suggest she is deflating the morale and confidence of new and veteran teachers by ignoring facts. When Parks leaves pink slips in the mailboxes of all nontenured teachers on the day they return from Spring Break, Kassi struggles with a dilemma: help them or get out. Finally, she deals with betrayal. A colleague whom she supported and helped in avoiding an administrative reprimand uses Kassi's name when she is caught breaking the law. She also suspects the colleague of feeding information to the principal to use against her. When a new teacher she is mentoring stands up to an administrator over a questionable evaluation, Kassi takes up the cause to rid the school of the overbearing Parks' administration by capitalizing on her knowledge of the world of fiction. Inspired by unforgettable characters and events in lit class favorites The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and others, she figures a way to help the new teachers and set up Parks for failure. A promising job interview serves as a distraction as she bides her time before activating her plan to derail the principal. It hinges on Parks' desire to pad her resum by getting a not-so-academically successful football player into a Division One university and on the incompetence of a vice-principal. Events work in her favor until both Kassi and Parks zero in on the perpetrator of the bomb threats. Bullied, beleaguered, betrayed. Kassi must decide where her loyalties lie.