Jeremy Prince said he believes the teacher, who represented South Hadley High School, vilified his daughter.
Undated family photo of Phoebe Prince.NORTHAMPTON - Phoebe Prince’s father said he reacted in “shock and disgust” when he learned that a teacher he believes vilified his daughter represented South Hadley High School at a White House conference on bullying Thursday.
Jeremy Prince told MSNBC’s Martin Bashir that the teacher’s presence at the gathering with President Barack Obama appeared to be “a cynical public relations exercise carefully orchestrated and frankly rather disgusting.”
His 15-year-old daughter Phoebe, a freshman at South Hadley High School, committed suicide in January 2010 following intense harassment from some classmates, according to prosecutors who have charged some students with civil rights violations.
Among the others at the White House event was Sirdeaner Walker, whose son, 11-year-old Carl Walker-Hoover, took his life in 2009 after being bullied at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield, his mother has said.
The suicides of Carl and Phoebe helped spark a national campaign against school bullying that led to Thursday’s White House Conference on Bullying Prevention. Obama told the media that he himself was targeted by classmates because of his unusual name and big ears.
Prince did not identify the teacher by name, but Stephanie Viens, a history teacher at the high school, was the only staff member from the South Hadley school system at the first such White House conference. She could not be reached for comment at school or at home.
However, School Superintendent Gus A. Sayer called the allegation against Viens “totally unfair” and rebutted Prince’s characterization of her attendance at the White House as a public relations ploy.
Sayer said Friday it was the Massachusetts Teachers Association, not his school system, that nominated Viens to attend the conference.
Viens was one of the people in South Hadley who took action following Phoebe’s death, starting “Count Me In,” an organization that encourages students in and around town to volunteer for community-oriented projects as a way of achieving healing in the community following the girl’s suicide.
In an interview Thursday with Bashir, Prince said his family knew nothing about the conference until they began receiving telephone calls from reporters Wednesday night. Unlike Walker, who has spoken publicly about her son and the issue of bullying on many occasions, the Prince family has generally shied away from the media. Prince told Bashir they have been trying to “create a cocoon of normality” for Phoebe’s younger sister, who is now 13.
However, Prince said he was upset that Viens was chosen to attend the conference, saying the family believes she spread untruths about Phoebe online. Prince declined to mention Viens by name, saying he does not have conclusive proof of his allegation, but Eileen Moore, his sister-in-law and Phoebe Prince’s aunt, confirmed Friday that Viens was the person in question.
Sayer vouched for Viens’s work on bullying and noted that the allegation against is unsubstantiated.
“I’ve never heard anything negative about her,” he said. “I’d like to see what (the allegations) are based on. That was totally shocking to me, and terribly unfair.”
In his interview with Bashir, Jeremy Prince spoke of the difficulties his own family has encountered trying to achieve closure in the wake of his daughter’s death. Among them, he said, is the intense media coverage of the bullying issue.
“We cannot let my little girl lie in her grave in peace because we’re continually being pestered by the fact that she is a poster child for a campaign which is not about her,” he said. “This is about how people behave in schools, how those schools administer it, and about the law. Couldn’t they leave our daughter alone?”
On a personal level, Prince said simple things, like seeing grapes, Phoebe’s favorite fruit, at the supermarket bring back the pain of her death.
“It keeps coming back and it keeps hitting you and it keeps giving you immense distress,” he said.