The city will spend a whopping $29 million in 2013 on the salaries and benefits of outcast educators who are deemed too dangerous or incompetent to work in public school classrooms but cannot be immediately fired, the Daily News has learned.
As of Friday, there were 326 city educators who have been reassigned away from the classroom yet were still collecting pay, a sharp rise from 2012, when 218 ousted teachers drained $22 million from city coffers, Education Department records show.
The teachers and school administrators are accused of abusing kids, breaking rules or just being lousy educators. But they’re still collecting salaries because of a controversial firing process that makes it too difficult to terminate bad employees, education officials charge.
Back in 2010, Mayor Bloomberg and the city teachers union agreed to eliminate the shameful “rubber rooms” that house these expensive educational pariahs, but critics say the only difference is that today the accused teachers are spread out in spare offices across the city instead of being herded together.
“We still have rubber rooms,” said Francesco Portelos, an engineering teacher from Intermediate school 49 on Staten Island who has been reassigned away from the classroom for more than 17 months. “The only difference is we’re not being corralled anymore.”
Portelos has spent his time sitting on his hands while continuing to draw his salary of $75,000 as he’s investigated on a variety of charges, including misuse of school property. He even ran a live video stream of himself reading the newspaper in an empty conference room at a Queens district office until the city found out and gave him menial filing jobs. He says he’s innocentand his exile is retaliatory.
Education Department officials blame the union, and say that part of the problem is that the power to fire bad teachers is in the hands of jointly appointed hearing officers. Some of the hearing officers are just too lenient, officials say.
Of 72 educators whose firing hearings were completed in 2013, just 32 were canned. Instead of being fired, the rest received fines or suspensions.
Some of the educators who dodged the firing bullet in 2013 to return to jobs in city schools include:
*Stefan Hudson, a former dean at Westinghouse High School, who grabbed, pushed, shook and slammed a student into a table. A hearing officer fined him $10,000 and required him to complete an anger management seminar at his own expense.
*Shenequa Duke, a Bronx special education teacher at Intermediate School 25 who used a broom to hit a late-arriving student. Despite an “apparent lack of contrition,” a hearing officer merely ordered her suspended for 45 days.
*Edgar Ortiz, a teacher at Bronx Public School 73, who was arrested for patronizing a prostitute in 2012. He reported back to school the following day without notifying his superiors of the arrest as required by city rules. The hearing officer found him “remorseful” and stuck him with $7,500 fine.
Education Department officials blame the union and lenient hearing officers for leaving too many bad apples on the city payroll.
“We’ve worked extraordinarily hard to remove either poor-performing or grossly inappropriate educators, but special interests to protect adults over children – aim to impede the process,” said agency spokesman Devon Puglia.
In September, the city filed a suit against the teachers union, claiming it is impeding the 2010 agreement to speed the firing process and eliminate the rubber rooms. But a union spokesman said the hearing officers who have the power to fire teachers serve at the pleasure of the Education Department.
“The Department of Education can and does stop using any arbitrator with whose decisions it disagrees,” said union spokesman Dick Riley. “The Department of Education also has the ability to appeal arbitrators’ decisions to the courts.”
