The telephone calls began soon after Wendy Waller resigned her teaching job at Chesapeake’s Greenbrier Intermediate School, after school officials determined that her students “may have been exposed” to questions and answers on some Standards of Learning tests.
“Parents were calling the house. They were very supportive,” said Wendy Lynn Waller.
There was just one problem: They were calling the wrong Wendy Waller.
Wendy Lynn Waller of Virginia Beach is the finance manager at Checkered Flag Toyota — not a teacher.
Waller, a mother of four, said the calls tapered off, but “everybody and their brother” have said something to her about the SOL controversy. Even her father-in-law called to say, “You know everybody has called. . . .”
Waller and her husband, Joseph, started letting their answering machine pick up messages, including this one: “Give me a call. Tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s crazy,” Waller said. “If I see a number I don’t recognize, I don’t answer.”
Newspapers try to give readers enough identifying information to avoid the possibility that someone with a similar name will be pegged as the person being written about.
We had offered nothing beyond the fact that Wendy Waller was a first-year teacher at Greenbrier Intermediate. No middle initial, no city of residence.
Lorraine Eaton, The Pilot’s Education Team leader, said she wishes we could have provided more information early on so the confusion could have been prevented. Reporters tried, she said, but the school is treating the matter as a personnel issue and have not released any information about Waller. Not even her name, which The Pilot got from parents of Greenbrier students.
As I was writing this, word came that a member of the Education Team had finally located Wendy Waller, the teacher, and was interviewing her. The story ran front page on Friday. The teacher is Wendy L. Waller, too. Wendy Lou Waller. Talk about coincidences.
SOUNDS LIKE … The caller wanted it known that he didn’t mean any slight to Paul D. Camp Community College. He was sure it was a decent school and all, but he doubted seriously whether it had a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. “That’s a pretty big deal, you know,” he said. “The big schools have that and all.”
He cited a May 10 story in The Sun, the tabloid for Suffolk readers. It profiled Sharon Burgess, who has a 3.9 grade point average and is a December candidate for an associate’s degree in business management.
Burgess was identified — twice — as the president of the college’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
Turns out that’s really Phi Theta Kappa, which sounds a lot like Phi Beta Kappa if you say it fast.
Which is what the Pilot correspondent who wrote the story said she thought she heard.
Later last month, in interviewing two Paul D. Camp graduates, one a Phi Theta member, the correspondent learned of her mistake. When she said Phi Beta Kappa, the student corrected her.
No one had contacted the writer about the published error and the correspondent figured, “I’ll know from now on.”
Indeed, in her May 20 Sun story, she noted that Burgess is Phi Theta Kappa president.
Phi Theta Kappa, by the way, touts itself as the “International Honor Society of the Two-Year College.”
PAGANS: John Wilde has learned a valuable lesson: Be careful what you tell a reporter.
Wilde, who says he’s of Miami Indian descent, told staff writer Phyllis Speidell that he was a member of the Tidewater Native American Support Group and that he would lead “traditional American Indian sweat lodge ceremonies” at a pagan gathering in Isle of Wight County over the Memorial Day weekend.
The story in the May 28 Hampton Roads section angered the Tidewater Native American Support Group. One, because, they say, Wilde, who has attended several group meetings, is not a bona fide card-carrying member. But more importantly, group leaders wanted everyone to know that they had no connection to the pagan gathering or pagan customs.
The group’s directors drafted a letter to The Pilot saying as much. Neither the group nor its members, they said, conduct sweat lodges. They are conducted “by experienced, qualified medicine men or women, and certainly not at public gatherings attended by those who do not believe in The Creator, as most Native Americans are Christians,” the letter said.
Finally, Wilde e-mailed me seeking a “retraction” of his statement to Speidell. “My actions were my own and continue to be,” wrote Wilde, who says he has been “dropped by the group and others in the area” for his actions.
If you’re wondering what the sweat lodge is, I offer this from the support group’s letter: “The sweat lodge could be compared to a Catholic confessional.”
