Leonora Rustamova, 40, known as Miss Rusty, said it was an attempt to inspire the 15-year-old boys as they hated women and were regularly in trouble with police, overtly racist and violent. Head Stephen Ball suspended and then fired her.
She had taught at Calder High School, a comprehensive in Halifax, for 11 years and she had used feedback from a group of pupils, who called themselves “the Commie Boys”, to write the novel.
It features a teacher, also called Miss Rusty, and five Year 11 pupils who are her “favourites”, and the plot talks of pupils missing lessons, stealing phones and setting themselves on fire. There are also numerous sexual references and hints that the characters took drugs. The teacher arranged for her husband Denis to print 12 bound copies using a publishing website so they could be given to the boys when they left school.
But her husband then accidentally made the novel, titled “Stop! Don’t Read This’’, available on the Internet.
She lost her job in May 2009 for a “reckless disregard for confidentiality and child safeguarding issues”.
Rustamova told the tribunal that her year teaching “the Commie Boys” was a “fantastic experience”, and that she enjoyed “developing them and their attitudes and seeing all but one successfully avoid being expelled”. “The boys were proud of the book. It raised their self-esteem and self-awareness as well as their interest in literacy,” she said.
Liked the story?
0
0
0
0
0
