South Hadley High misses the point, again

She didn’t follow the party line at South Hadley High, which from the beginning was to blame Phoebe and excuse the bullies. Phoebe was the outsider, the clueless blow-in from overseas who brought all her troubles on herself. That was the party line.

Caldieri never bought it.

“Phoebe was a very vulnerable child, who should have been protected,’’ Caldieri said. “You weren’t supposed to talk about what happened. I did, and … I’ve become a non-person there.’’

That non-person stuff isn’t hyperbole. Caldieri is the Winston Smith of South Hadley High. The cards her students have left at school for her since she went on medical leave last December were never delivered. Her photo is not in the new yearbook. Like the protagonist of George Orwell’s “1984,’’ she’s officially a non-person at South Hadley High. She doesn’t exist anymore.

Of course, you can find the yearbook photo of the teacher who badmouthed Phoebe in front of her students after the suicide. Unlike Deb Caldieri, she’s a teacher in good standing.

Upside down? You betcha.

This all began the day after Phoebe hanged herself. Four girls in Caldieri’s Latin class were wracked with guilt because they felt like they had made light of a boy in class who didn’t have the nerve to ask Phoebe to the school cotillion.

“They wanted this boy to know that they were grieving Phoebe, too,’’ Caldieri said.

The boy was upset and had stayed home from school, so the girls asked if they could go to his house. Caldieri called the boy’s mother who said he could use the boost. Caldieri suffers from multiple sclerosis, so she had one of the girls drive.

The kids cried together and, as Caldieri put it, “showed remarkable compassion toward each other. On a terrible day, they showed such caring.’’

But when Caldieri got back to school, principal Dan Smith called her into his office.

“He said it was the stupidest thing I’d ever done. And then he said, ‘I want you out of my school.’ ’’

You would think Smith would have had better things to do the day after one of his students killed herself. But he set his sights on Caldieri.