They should have been fired. They must be fired. And the job protections given even to teachers whose conduct would get them arrested on the subway must be eliminated.
Case histories reveal the school disciplinary system to be so rigged that inappropriately touching a third-grader, pressing intimately against a high school girl and sharing porn with a high school boy fall short of firing offenses.
How can United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew sleep at night?
Using the Freedom of Information Law, the Daily News obtained the files on 16 teachers who kept their jobs after being brought up on egregious charges, some sexual, some involving excessive personal familiarity with students.
Chancellor Dennis Walcott had identified the 16 as having been worthy of dismissal when he reviewed disciplinary cases in the wake of the arrests of several school staff members. His judgment was dead-on right, a conclusion any parent would agree with after reading the documents.
The insanity is neatly encapsulated in the action of one employment arbitrator who issued a reprimand to a teacher rather than a termination notice with the immortal words: “Respondent’s actions at best give the appearance of impropriety and at worst suggest pedophilia.”
Still more outrageous, two of the wrist-slapped miscreants have been hit with new charges.
Brooklyn Tech gym teacher Edward Cascio got a three-month suspension after willingly receiving pornographic photos from a student in 2003. Cascio, who never reported the incident, pleaded that he had not known the pictures were of another student and, absurdly, that no one had ever told him taking porn from a student was out of bounds.
The second alleged repeat offender, dance teacher Michael Dalton of Public School 366 in Manhattan, was fined just $2,000 for cradling third-grade boys on his lap and tickling them.
What Cascio and Dalton did to merit new scrutiny is, for now, confidential. One can only imagine, after considering their first trips through an arbitration process whose highest priority is guarding the interests of teachers, seemingly no matter how grotesque their behavior.
Short of a sex-crime conviction, anything goes, thanks to notorious section 3020(a) of the state education law. The statute says that teachers may be fired only for just cause — which would be reasonable, except that arbitrators find that only the most extreme behavior provides just cause.
Why would arbitrators throw kids to the wolves? Because they make a living deciding such cases — and because they are hired by joint agreement of the Education Department and the UFT. They well know that if they toss teachers out of work, the union will do the same to them.
So here’s what you get.
You get Norman Siegel, who was accused by an Adlai Stevenson High School girl of pressing his penis against her leg. Although the arbitrator found that the girl’s charge was likely true, Siegel got a 45-day unpaid suspension — though he was previously accused of a similar offense.
And you get Willie Laraque, a gym and health teacher at George Washington Carver High School, who bent a male student over a desk, stood behind him, leaned in and said, “I’ll show you what is gay.” ($10,000 fine)
In establishing a program to rate the education performance of teachers, Gov. Cuomo took the job of judging whether instructors should be fired for incompetence away from 3020(a) arbitrators.
He must do the same for teachers accused of behavioral wrongdoing. He must fight to shift those cases to the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, where every other civil servant goes for adjudication. OATH’s professional administrative judges have no built-in bias against rendering the tough rulings needed to protect kids.
