Class Warfare

Amanda also carried a little more baby weight than some of her friends, so Sheryl Pouls had come into the classroom and asked Tollin to monitor her diet. Some of the other kids had been making fun of Amanda for being “fat,” Sheryl said.

In her complaint, Tollin says she responded that rather than single Amanda out, she would present a healthy eating lesson to the whole class. Several weeks later, at a parent-teacher conference, Tollin brought up the issues she had discussed with Amanda’s mother with Michael Pouls.

Throughout the fall, Amanda’s complaints at home escalated: She would say that Tollin had yelled at her for not doing in-class assignments fast enough or not finishing her homework. In the mornings before school, she would cry, complain of stomachaches, and beg not to go to school. Gradually, it began to occur to her parents that something other than their daughter’s sensitive constitution might be to blame.

“There was one crystallizing moment for me,” says Michael Pouls. One morning when he went to drop Amanda off at school, she wouldn’t get out of the car. “I had forgotten the night before — they gave these kids this impossible task where they had 10 words, and for those 10 words you had to find two rhyming words, like ‘root,’ ‘moot’ and ‘suit,’” he recalls. “We had spent a lot of time on it. I had looked at the dictionary, even. So we were in the car, and we had hit a brick wall and we couldn’t figure out this one rhyming word. And she would not get out of the car. I sat in the parking lot with her for 20 minutes trying to think of this word.”

“Just tell the teacher you couldn’t think of it,” he says he told his daughter.

“I can’t,” Amanda replied. “She’ll yell at me and embarrass me in front of the whole class.”

Amanda had complained about being embarrassed by the teacher another time, Pouls recalls. She had described to her parents a seemingly harrowing cafeteria incident in which Mrs. Tollin had forced her to replace the white bread on her sandwich with wheat. “Amanda said, ‘I can’t eat whole wheat because I’ll vomit. I don’t like it,’” recalls Sheryl Pouls, tears welling in her eyes as she remembers the incident. “And Mrs. Tollin made her go throw it out and get a whole-wheat sandwich. And Amanda blamed me. She said it was my fault that Mrs. Tollin was making her do that. She was so embarrassed that she had to eat it.” (Tollin denies that the Wheat Bread Incident ever occurred, saying, “I’ve never made a student eat anything.”)

“That’s the kind of activity that was happening,” interjects Michael Pouls. “We wanted to know if the teacher could look out for our daughter and make sure she only had one sweet snack. That’s what we asked her to do. Instead, what the teacher did was humiliate Amanda in front of all the kids in the lunchroom about how she was eating all the wrong stuff. She singled out Amanda because she felt the right.”