Central Bucks East teacher struggles with celebrity after blog uproar

Suspended Bucks County teacher Natalie Munroe says she wasn't seeking a national audience when she used her blog to lambaste some students as "frightfully dim," "whiny," "tactless," and "utterly loathsome in all imaginable ways," among other choice descriptors.

But now that she has everyone's attention, she is expanding on the theme that has gotten her into such a jam.

"Every year, there seems to be a little more attitude" from students, said the 11th-grade English teacher, who was sent home Feb. 9 from Central Bucks High School East. There is "more necessity for parent contacts for behavioral issues; for students not pulling their weight; more parental involvement from a 'Why did my kid not have an A?' standpoint, not from a 'What can I do at home to help fix this problem?' . . .

"It's sort of like coddling the parents and the students," she said in an interview Thursday. "Like it's some sort of business and they're the customer we're there to please."

The 30-year-old Warminster resident put up her now-infamous blog post more than a year ago, although it was brought to the Central Bucks School District's attention only this month. It has since been taken down.

In an entry titled "If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say," she confessed that she wanted to tell some parents that their children deserved report-card comments such as "simpering grade-grubber with an unrealistically high perception of own ability level," "weirdest kid I've ever met," and "liar and cheater."

She wrote under the name Natalie M. and did not identify her school, district, colleagues, or students, but the blog - "Where Are We Going, and Why Are We in This Handbasket?" - included her picture. It regularly got "nine readers, two of whom were myself and my husband," she said, adding that it consisted mostly of innocuous musings about her daily life.

"My blog was a nice chronicle for me - like an online diary so my friends could read it," she said. "I'm not a risk taker. I'm not a rule breaker. . . . I'm not a trouble inviter."

It is unclear who brought Munroe's blogged remarks, some of them profane, to the attention of district officials. But by the morning of Feb. 9, they were up on students' Facebook pages, and "everybody knew about it," she said.

Suspending her with pay, administrators scrambled to distance themselves from her sentiments, which "are in no way representative of how we feel about our students or how the teachers and faculty feel about them," Central Bucks East principal Abram Lucabaugh said.

Munroe's story was picked up by Education Week's online edition and the Huffington Post, and she was interviewed Thursday on CNN.

Only a fifth-year teacher, Munroe said she was frustrated.

"I think the students' desire . . . seems more and more to get an A," she said in the Inquirer interview. "They don't care how they get an A. . . . They want an A. Not an A-minus, an A."

And, she said, more and more pressure "is being put on the teacher and less on the student. . . . It's more us pulling them through and less us walking arm and arm through the process."

Students are often difficult to engage, Munroe said. "It feels like you have to put on a dog and pony show for every lesson, and God forbid you should put on a lesson and it's not interesting. God forbid you just sit there and have a discussion."

Those who label her an angry, burned-out teacher who shouldn't be trusted with children's education have it wrong, she said. "At the end of the day, I still went in and got my job done and got it done well." Her posts, she said, were just "a way for me to blow off steam at the end of the day."

Munroe's fate is uncertain.

On Thursday, Central Bucks spokeswoman Carol Counihan would say only that the matter was "still an ongoing investigation."

Steven L. Rovner, Munroe's attorney, maintained that she had done nothing wrong.

The district's response, he said, is "censorship. . . . They are saying, 'You can't write what you feel.' " Her right to write, he said, is protected by the First Amendment.

But Rovner and Munroe said it would be difficult or impossible for her to return to work at the school.

The district has "empowered the parents and the students to believe that they're right and Natalie was wrong," Rovner said. "Now, to go back in that situation, she'd have no respect as a teacher because of what they've done."

Munroe said she was still struggling to come to grips with her new reality.

"You go to work one day," she said, "and your life changes in a snap. It's surreal."

She is not apologetic, however, and said she believed her remarks "hit a nerve."

"I'm thinking this is something that has been in the back of people's minds for a while and maybe a conversation needed to be started about it," she said. "I just wish I were not so in the center of it."