Cruel lesson for a teacher

Sayer said he hadn’t heard from Caldieri in months, so he had to go hire a new Latin teacher before classes start in September.

“I called Gus Sayer on Friday and asked him why he couldn’t have called me about this and he said my phone was out of service,’’ Deb Caldieri said. “My house phone is out,’’ she said, “because they haven’t been paying me all year and I can’t afford it. But I still have my cellphone. When I asked him why he couldn’t have just called me on my cellphone, he said he didn’t have the number. But the school called me on that number all the time.’’

That’s not what Sayer told me.

“The only number we had for her was her house,’’ he said.

Why not just go to her house and tell her face to face?

“I didn’t know if she was living at home,’’ he said.

But then, that’s the address that the termination letter was sent to, so maybe we’re beating a dead horse here.

In the end, Caldieri’s termination was handled the same way as her slow and torturous exit from South Hadley High: with a cold detachment that made the deterioration of her health inevitable.

The day after Prince, 15, hanged herself in January 2010, after months of bullying at the hands of other students, Caldieri responded with compassion, taking four girls to visit a boy who had liked Phoebe and was devastated by her suicide.

Dan Smith, who has just stepped down as principal, accused Caldieri of not getting the proper approval to take the kids out of school. Whether she did or not was very much open to debate, but that was a smoke screen anyway. Caldieri’s real sin was to challenge Smith’s authority and suggest that Phoebe wasn’t protected as she should have been. Smith told her he was going to get rid of her, and he did.

Other administrators would sit in on her classes, challenging her teaching methods. Her MS was already wearing on her, and the stress from Smith’s threat and the intimidation tactics of other administrators triggered seizures. She went on medical leave in December, bullied out of South Hadley High just as Phoebe was.