Leonora Rustamova

“Dedicated teacher Leonora Rustamova wrote a book to engage five teenage rebels in her class. But after it went up on a website she was dismissed,” according to a report in the Observer.

In an effort to engage a group of hard-to-reach teenagers, high school teacher Rustamova wrote  a series of on-going stories that eventually became a novel called Stop! Don’t Read This! Using their school as a backdrop, she fictionalized the lives of the students and managed to turn them into readers.

As a result, she was lauded by students, parents and the school’s administrators for her exceptional work with the boys. “It boosted their self-esteem; it engaged them. We were having conversations and discussions,” Rustamova tells the Observer. “For a group of boys like this, that was incredible. I thought it would be a lovely gesture to have it printed for when they left school.”

To make hard copies of the book for the boys’ graduation, Rustamova’s husband helped out by using an online publishing website—and that’s were the trouble started. Without the teacher’s knowledge, the site made the book available for free download. A complaint was soon lodged, and Rustomova was summarily suspended and escorted from the building.

The Observer continues,

…within months suspension had been turned into dismissal. Rustamova had lost her job, her career, and, during the investigation into her conduct, she was banned from talking to anyone from the school or its community, which included many of her friends.

“It feels so insane, this draconian reality that you are not allowed to speak to anyone within your own community, and I was always quite involved in my community — I still am, so to disappear from it like that, especially in a small town, it was very difficult not to worry there was going to be a bit of a witch-hunt.”

Stop! Don’t Read This! tackled some of the themes in the boys’ lives — drugs, truancy, crime — and touched briefly on sexuality. It will be published by a small local publisher, Blue Moose, with proceeds going towards community projects. According to the Observer, the boys “who had once been consigned to the educational scrapheap, have defied expectations and all gone on to further education and employment.”

“‘We keep in touch and they like to joke that I spent so much time getting them to avoid the dole queue and now it’s me that’s on it, not them,” Rustomova says, “I can’t regret the book because of the effect it had on the students. I regret the mistake that allowed the book to end up on the website briefly. I regret my career coming crashing down.'”

Which just goes to prove the old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.”