Beightol was met by school police officers when he got to work and transferred to the region office pending an investigation.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Last week, about 80 teachers and students flooded the hallways of Michael Krop Senior High in North Miami Beach to prevent school district administrative heavies from hauling off a rebellious chemistry teacher to the bureaucratic equivalent of a whipping in the woodshed.

Shawn Beightol just tried to keep teaching. He had a feeling he knew what was going on outside his door, but didn’t want to do anything to further jeopardize his job. Then a coach came to the door and said, “We got you, man. We got your door. Nobody’s coming in here.”

With the hallway shut down, the goon squad decided there must be an easier hit somewhere else. The principal stuck his head inside Beightol’s classroom. The meeting was canceled. But the fight wasn’t over. Beightol knew his months of inciting fellow teachers to protest low salaries had finally caused the great beast that fed them all to turn on him, snarling.

This is his story, anyway. Not long afterward, I sat with Beightol at a delightful waterfront restaurant in North Bay Village to try to figure out whether he is the brave new face of teacher activism in Miami, or just another budding politician riding a tide.

After all, the United Teachers of Dade leadership, post the era of felonious über-boss Pat Tornillo, is vulnerable. Tornillo was the little big man, surrounded by a comfortable flock that never told him no. So, when he left, nobody knew what to do. It takes time to build an effective political machine from scratch, even in the best of times.

These aren’t those times. The economy of the last five years was dangerously pumped up by the real estate hype. Suddenly, a lot of Miami-Dade teachers realized they couldn’t do it anymore. Adding to the insult, they watched teacher salaries exceed theirs in Broward County.

Without getting too much into the rhetoric of how public education is funded, I think what teachers are worth depends a lot on an individual teacher’s level of education and ability, the working conditions (the size and demographics of the class as well as school leadership), and the subject taught. It doesn’t make sense to pay someone teaching a handful of 6-year-olds to finger-paint the same as a nationally certified teacher pounding math or English into two dozen apathetic teenagers.

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