History teacher Marko Pištalo from the Fifth Belgrade Gymnasium has been removed from teaching duties again, eight months after he was previously suspended, and new disciplinary proceedings have been launched against him. He told N1 that he was suspended again after teaching just one class, with the reason being the publication of a photograph with a dismissed colleague alongside a quote from a work by Danilo Kiš.
“Will they intimidate us? No, they won’t. It is my right to speak out, to stand up against injustice, to support a colleague, and to protest against injustice. The price has been a suspension, a three-month penalty, and now another suspension. That price is really not too high for me, although I live for the day when doing such things will cost nothing,” the teacher emphasized.
Pištalo said he returned after eight months of “involuntary absence,” and that the school’s legal adviser told him to come and collect the decision after he had taught a class.
“I thought it was a decision allowing me to return to work, but it turned out that they let me teach one class only to hand me the decision removing me from work again after that single class,” he said.
The teacher added that the official explanation, as they put it, was that he had “insulted people whom he had neither mentioned nor named, thereby offending their dignity and integrity.”
“What I actually did — as opposed to their interpretation — was publish a photograph with a colleague who was completely unjustifiably dismissed. I included a quote from Danilo Kiš’s book A Tomb for Boris Davidovich,” he explained.
As he added, he wrote: “Boris Davidovich, do not give in to the sons of bitches.”
“With that, I alluded to precisely the same situation that is now happening to my colleague, without any intention of mentioning anyone personally or specifically. After all, it is an interpretation of a literary work, and anyone who has attended school — and we have all attended at least primary school — understands that a literary work is not interpreted literally. I put the quote in quotation marks; the situation could refer to anything or anyone,” he said.
Pištalo also said that he had been suspended eight months earlier, also because of Instagram posts and, as he put it, “a false complaint about alleged inappropriate conduct, supposedly signed by a girl who attended that school.”
“She explicitly denied it when called by the former school principal, saying that she had filed no complaint. Her mother said the same. That was not enough for them, even though the complaint was obviously false and did not describe a single specific incident. They imposed a three-month suspension on me and filed a criminal complaint based on that false report,” he said.
As he added, the new acting principal took over, or inherited, his case.
“The first thing he did after I gave my statement was call my legal representative and offer a settlement. He waved some kind of criminal complaint around and said he would withdraw it if I resigned voluntarily,” he said.
The teacher stressed that pedagogical principles were also being violated.
“The same thing is happening to people who are being stripped of their homeroom teacher positions. All of this is justified by the principal’s authority. The only explanation is that they can do it,” he said, adding that these are colleagues who have been working for decades.
He added that disciplinary proceedings last six months, by which time a final decision must be made.
“Past practice has shown that the school administration makes maximum use of that period and keeps us suspended for as long as possible,” he emphasized.
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Source: N1, Foto: N1
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