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I feel bad writing this but feel like I have to. Scotch Plains Fanwood High School let a woman teach there for decades named Lynette Birkins. She is now running around saying she is a lesbian and knew it for decades. Well, when she taught at the high school, she taught Psychology and Sex Ed and Health. She would tell the students that anyone who was gay or questioning was "emotionally delayed." Actually she used a worse word than delayed but Complaints Board will not let me type it, it's so bad. She said they were "on the level of seven-year-olds" and "abnormal!" She didn't stop there, she would point fingers at people all the time saying this one was crazy, that one was showing psychiatric symptoms, the other one had issues, etc. Meantime all this while she HERSELEF was concealing her own situation from people and lying about it but still labeling and blaming everyone else! I think Miss Birkins owes everybody an apology, the students, the parents, everybody. This was all just very sick. Yes I understand she might have been fired for her life but even so, to do this to impressionable teenagers is just evil.
I believe there is a lot more to this story. A WHOLE lot more. That woman was constantly, endlessly trying to undermine me. Any time I had a question about anything in psychology, she would basically attack me for asking, and try to turn me against myself or make me doubt myself just for being curious. It didn't work, but she never stopped trying. This is not the behavior of a normal teacher, since teachers are supposed to encourage curiosity, not try to shut it down. So I wonder, and have been wondering for a long while, just what exactly was the real purpose of this kind of behavior on the part of a teacher towards a student. Adults who deliberately try to make children doubt themselves are usually up to nefarious purposes. Need I say more here? Do I have to spell out what this might have indicated? The Scotch Plains Fanwood school system should investigate this no matter how long ago these strange events may have happened and whether she had a personality disorder or not. Let me say it again. I believe there is more to this story.
Look, word on the street is that that teacher has Borderline Personality Disorder. People with that condition lie like rugs and are more manipulative than dictators. I'm not surprised to read that this happened in her classroom, unbelievable though it may be. Stay away from such people. Just run if you see her coming.
(I apologize for the typo above; "no fear" was supposed to be typed as "an affair. "
I'm not diminishing anything, but the more I think about it, there were a lot of situations of hypocrisy in that High School. We were read the riot act by a teacher before a field trip, about being on her best behavior, while we found out that teacher have no fear that weekend. The nurse, who was supposed to be promoting good Health, displayed by posters in her office, was very overweight and would often be smoking ... right there in her office (smoking was allowed in the school buildings back then).And, I won't even get into serious problems with the special education system in the early eighties, at spfhs. I'm just so thankful that my son, who has special needs, is growing up in a different era as well as a different school system, and so many of these things are simply not tolerated. Actually, zero tolerance.
That school system certainly does need to do something about this. When I was at SPFHS I remember a girl who was told by one of the male math teachers that if certain of the female teachers, including some of the coaches, invited her to a camping trip, don't go, it's actually a deviant orgy! Why was such a story out there, and being told to students by male teachers, yet? What was going on there? How did news of such a camping trip leak out? Something needs to be done! And better late than never at all.
Reprehensible is one word for her, yes. For an LGBTQ woman to say vicious things like that to teenagers when they were her own kind she must also be a sociopath. Sadistic, too. How does she justify her actions to herself. Sick, sick, sick. She should have been stopped. And also. Ought to be locked up.
I also had her as a Teacher in the early 80's, and there was just something that made me uncomfortable. She seemed uncomfortable with herself, and unhappy...yet projected it onto others. I guess the term is "self righteous." I did well in her class, and she wanted to keep a copy of one of my papers - I told her I'd rather not share it. She "dissed" me after that, and when I'd see her in town she'd be almost nasty. I also remember her making references to people who strugged with their sexuality as "disturbed" and "emotionally delayed." And, from what I read above she's going around proclaiming she is a lesbian? Then, her actions were reprehensible in SPFHS. Even though she is retired, she has no business "advertising" her lifestyle now. And I'm really sorry those of you above had negative experiences. Just a perfect example of hypocrisy, and selfishness, unfortunately and now I have even less respect for this individual than I had years back.
Surprised to read all this. Sounds like something happened to her. I was her student in the mid 60's and at that time she was a gym teacher only and was quite young and seemed pretty normal. I was very uncomfortable around her, couldn't please her, because for some reason she didn't like me and treated me condescendingly. She was nice to some of the others but she hardly talked to me. I was in Leaders Club (a gym honor roll type of helper) but she criticized my handwriting all the time and made a big deal of it (it confused me because I was an honor student and my handwriting was perfectly legible). Once she sent me to spy on two girls who skipped class and I had to give her their names. They harassed me for the rest of the year. I don't know what the big secret was about her being gay over the years. It was something one didn't say out loud in the 60's but most of us had a good suspicion because she was sort of butch and she lived with the more feminine female Algebra teacher quite openly.
This is unacceptable. I recall that she was an old timer who worked at the school way back. Let me ask a question, did the comments she made that are described above by any chance take place around 1974-75-76? At that time the Board of Education for Scotch Plains and Fanwood was filled, just filled to the rafters, with attention-seeking gentlemen who were the town joke. People called the public Board of Ed meetings "the greatest show in town." They threw pennies at the board members, and candies, too, like it was a circus. Indeed, the way that Board behaved, it was, as the men involved were attention addicts. There were also parents in a group called the Alert Parents for Good Schools who would come to the meetings to taunt and torment the Board, then the Board would respond. The Alert Parents would also march with picket signs. One year the summer school even became cancelled because the Alert Parents make ridiculous allegations against the good people running it. The shenanigans of all involved were just beyond belief. Therefore if anyone complained about this teacher during this particular unfathomable time period it probably went right by the wayside. The Board had pennies to scoop up after the meetings and protecting the students wasn't their issue, never mind it's what they were elected to do. Unacceptable, all around.
If the teacher was so concerned about being fired from her job due to her lifestyle, then why didn't she just quit and find another job? Wouldn't that have been preferable to staying there and playing mind games on her students?
I knew this teacher and think she was a sad and pathetic soul. That said, if what's detailed here is an example of the kinds of misinformation she was telling students as a cover for her own story, then it couldn't be worse. She does need to apologize to the students and the parents. I agree completely with these complaints. I do hope the teacher gets the kind of help she herself desperately seems to have needed.
I agree, the school district most certainly owes the students and parents an apology for this particular situation. It's horrendous! There should be a better process in place for screening teachers before allowing them to infect the minds of the students with their own bizarre personal issues.
Inquiring minds want to know!
And one more thing. Why would any adult NEED to tell a teen who had been a crime victim that she wasn't? What is the motivation of a teacher who would say such a thing anyway. Was it to get some kind of emotional control over the student maybe? If it was, to what end? Where was the student going to be led by this odd woman?
P.S.: It's just so so so so so unprofessional for a teacher to do things like this!
I agree completely. I'm very glad to see someone file a complaint on this strange woman because I have wanted to say something about her for a long, long time.
She was more like the resident spy of Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School than a teacher. I've never encountered anyone quite like her. She thrived on getting "info" on people, and by that I mean, on students. Then when she got some "intel" on them, she was like world champion mind game player of that high school. She insinuated to one teenager who confided in her she had had been the victim of a crime that it was "all in her head, " as if it never happened! This is a sick and dangerous way of treating kids. It's also enough to make me wonder and make a lot of people who knew her wonder just what in the world she thought she was doing. Was all this innocent, how could it be innocent, really, or was there some more nefarious purpose to it? I've always wondered. Yes, the school does need to apologize for this woman behavior!