My son was injured at the Parkmont Elementary School

What is the most serious problem with our public school system? Teachers, principals, educational system researchers, politicians all have expressed in public settings of their own opinions. Education budgets, lack of parents involvement, student/family attitudes, etc. Yes, they are problems. But how about schools themselves? Our teachers? Our principals?


We could create all sorts of environment and facilities for people with obesity. But if they don’t think it’s a problem themselves, healthy diets, recreational access, all those seem irrelevant.

Teachers need to pay more attention to students. Principals need to be able to spot the problems and to have course of action to reconcile quickly. Schools need to have disciplines.

As a parent of a first grader in Parkmont Elementary School in Fremont Unified School District, I have sensed there is a lot to improve even if we couldn’t raise $4.5 million for the district.

My son had an accident in his PE class. He was pushed from behind and fell onto the track while running laps. His skin on cheek was scratched and left with over 20 1-to-2-inch bloody cuts. One lens of his glasses was scratched as well, but luckily, wasn’t broken to injure his eyes.

Note that I said it was an accident. It happens. We can try our best to prevent them from happening, but we cannot avoid them. Then it’s even more important how we respond and handle them after they take place.

The PE teacher hadn’t done anything to mitigate immediately. He simply told my son that his glasses were scratched and asked him to continue to run. He didn’t check how serious the cuts were, and didn’t do the necessary to help a 6-year-old, his student to feel less painful. When the class returned to classroom, there was no communication to the head teacher of the accident.

How about the head teacher of the class? She was told by other students of what happened. She sent my son to wash his wound himself. As a result, after he returned home, there was still sand in his cuts as well as his mouth. She didn’t attempt to get in touch with the PE teacher to investigate more. Hadn’t my wife specifically asked, she didn’t proactively explain to the parent what had happened.

Throughout the 3 hours after the accident took place, neither teachers had the slightest intention to send the injured child to office to have the wound checked up; neither of them thought of calling the parents; neither bothered to understand and document the accident. These simple and common sense responses were simply not in their mind.

When we talked with the principal afterwards, she was impatient during the conversation as if it wasn’t a serious matter.

She emphasized that the PE teacher had been doing good job, which was of the least connection to the topic. The attempt to sell us the idea that he was a good man was a poor technique trying to take things lightly. We were interested in this particular incident and had the least interest in blaming anyone in a generalized way.

She later on admitted that the teachers didn’t take this matter appropriately, and assured us that she would talk to both teachers. However, in a swift manner, she swallowed her own words 2 minutes later, and decided that the head teacher didn’t do anything wrong. Was it right to notice the injury but not notify the office and the parents? Was it appropriate to send a first grader to wash his cuts himself? Was it a responsible behavior as the head teacher knowing little about the accident?

As a leader in a school, if her intention was to cover and reduce the significance of mistakes, if it was to protect her teachers in front of parents who had an injured child, if it was to be in the position on the other side of the table from the parents, if the intention was not to solve the problem (as in the analogy of obesity), how would budget matter? How could such school ever improve?

Public school system is probably never going to be like private sector corporations, but to improve, they need to be competitive. Factors from outside is not as critical as the schools themselves. Teachers and principals are the face of schools. Unless we see responsible and capable people run the schools, having better public schools is perhaps still a dream.