Teacher's blog tells of sex, drugs and stealing at Chicago high school

Tracy Dell’Angela:

Typing rambling screeds in an anonymous blog he called “Fast Times at Regnef High,” a Fenger High School teacher unleashed his frustration over the chaos he saw around him.

He labeled his Chicago students “criminals,” saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed “project” dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their “baby mommas” and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.

He took swipes at his colleagues, too — “union-minimum” teachers, literacy specialists who “decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda,” and security officers whose “loyalty is to the hood, not the school.”

In his blog, the teacher did not identify himself or his students, the exact name of his school or even the city where he taught. But like all bloggers, he wanted an audience, so he wrote in his blog that he had leaked news of his site to a few coworkers. Soon enough, the 30-year-old teacher’s name was the talk of the school.

This week, after returning from spring break, the students read how they were depicted and flamed the blog with profane threats and righteous indignation toward the teacher.

By Thursday, the reaction grew so vitriolic that the blogger took down his site from Blogger.com. Also that day, a Fenger High teacher e-mailed his principal that he wasn’t coming to school because he “feared for his safety.” The teacher was the same one widely believed to have authored the blog because he told two colleagues that it was his, Fenger Principal William Johnson said.

Johnson said he doesn’t know whether the teacher has resigned, but he hasn’t returned phone calls or replied to an e-mail asking the teacher to meet with him. The teacher did not acknowledge to the principal that it was his blog, but Johnson said he has no doubt, based on the writing style and his disappearance after the students named him in their postings. When he started the blog in February, he wrote as if he were the “brick and mortar” building named “Regnef,” — Fenger spelled backwards — but then switched his voice and revealed he was a teacher.

In his final posting Thursday, the teacher said he intentionally leaked his blog site to people he knew would “tell the world” because he wanted it to be read, but he didn’t explain how he expected to remain anonymous.

Johnson believes it will be difficult for the teacher to return to Fenger, given the controversy. Because the teacher is untenured, the principal can fire him without cause at the end of the school year or after 10 work days if he doesn’t return.

“He’s lost his credibility,” Johnson said. “He lost the faith and trust of his students.”

The animosity stirred up by the blog fueled even more chaos in this embattled, all-black school on the city’s far South Side, among Chicago’s worst performing.

Apparently, honesty is not the best policy at Fenger High.