Sometimes, it only takes a small school award to expose a much bigger issue.

What would you do if you found out your school’s administration rigged a simple “Teacher of the Year” vote?

Would you stay out of it? Or would you fight for what you know is right?

In the following story, students find themselves in this very predicament and refuse to let it go.

Here’s how it played out.

Fix the vote, lose your jobs.

This one is pretty complicated, so it is hard to know where to start.

I had a music teacher in high school that got let go for seemingly no reason.

Many of us suspected that he was removed because the administration thought he was *** or ********; not sure if he was, though; he later married a woman, if I remember correctly.

Back when I was in high school, it was still difficult to be *** and stay a teacher.

Because he got let go without an explanation and he was a much-loved teacher, a few of the students, including myself, confronted the administration about the termination both in private meetings and at a school board meeting.

In all instances we were not given an explanation for the termination. I was young and probably did not understand the legality at the time. But in hindsight it makes sense that they said nothing.

The students decided to vote for the fired teacher in the “Teacher Of The Year” contest.

Fast forward a few months, and at the end of the year, there is a “Teacher Of The Year” award that the students vote on.

A few of us got it into our heads that we would campaign for the music teacher for “Teacher Of The Year” to stick it to the administration and show our appreciation for a beloved teacher.

As no one ever campaigns for “Teacher Of The Year” awards, it was probably going to be easy to tilt it to one side.

When the award was announced, it went to someone else.

A few days later, the award was announced, and it went to a different teacher who was retiring.

At first, I was disappointed, but the more I thought about it, the more it did not make sense. I did not know very many people who voted for the person who won the award. We had a small school, so it seemed unlikely that they would win.

A classmate and I did an informal poll and discovered that, at least according to the poll, the music teacher should have won by a landslide.

The students were suspicious and wanted to get to the bottom of this.

At this point, one other student and I brought our findings to a handful of teachers we trusted.

The teachers were irate, I mean completely livid. They all seemed to agree that this was not something that the administration should be teaching to students, that people can fix votes and cheat their way to a desired result.

They asked us what we wanted out of the situation, and we asked them to get the administration to apologize for fixing the vote. We confronted the guidance counselor and principal, who allegedly counted the votes. They got very defensive, denied they rigged the vote, and stormed out.

That evening, my father, who happened to be a small-town lawyer, got a call from the teachers (At the time, I was unaware; I learned about this later). The teachers had found the ballots in the dumpster in bags, shredded.

The teachers took the issue to the school board.

They were worried that their jobs would be in jeopardy if they took the ballots, so they passed the ballots to my father to keep in legal trust. They got a group of people together and assembled enough of the ballots to prove that the award was intentionally given to the wrong teacher.

The school board was provided with evidence that the vote was rigged.

At this point, the local news was involved. I can’t remember when they caught wind of the situation, but I think the teachers got the news involved at some point to protect their own jobs.

Here’s where the principal and guidance counselor got what was coming to them.

The guidance counselor and principal both got indefinite leave without pay and quit when they realized they would likely be terminated. All because they refused to apologize to the students for lying.

The one downside to this all is that the guidance counselor’s kid was a classmate of mine and a very nice kid. I still regret how the situation may have impacted him. As I grew up in a small town, to this day my father and their family are not on speaking terms because he had held those ballots in trust.

The whole situation seems absurd. That people would fix a meaningless award to a teacher and that people would get fired for it was well beyond the world I knew before that time.

Wow! Those two had some nerve!

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit have to say about this story.

True, but the kids should’ve figured that.

Agree. The teacher must’ve been fired for good reason.

They must not have thought about this.

This is a great point.

Such a silly thing to rig.

While it’s wrong, they probably had a great reason for doing so – it’s just a shame they went about it this way.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.