Principal fiddles while classroom burns

There’s really nothing funny about what happened. With her reckless action, Martin endangered the safety of the more than 500 students and 40 staff members at the K-8 school. Luckily, a heroic teacher was able to put out the fourth-floor fire before it spread. That teacher also sustained the only injury, suffering smoke inhalation. It was the paramedics treating her who finally called the Fire Department.

So why did Martin call the lockdown and fail to call the Fire Department? That’s still unclear, but the school superintendent and the head of school safety in Brooklyn did visit PS 289 the day after the fire. Whether they’ll conduct a full investigation is an open question — but, if they don’t, it won’t be the strangest thing that has happened in the Educational Twilight Zone.

Martin isn’t the only principal acting strangely these days. On Feb. 2, one of the iciest days in recent memory, the coldhearted principal of PS 30 on Staten Island, Denise Spina, threatened to dock the pay of a group of teachers who arrived to work five minutes late. The teachers, who live on Staten Island’s South Shore, had carpooled to the Westerleigh school in order to minimize driving in the dangerous conditions. But their sensible decision won them little favor with Spina, who intercepted the teachers in the lobby, virtually tapping on her wristwatch.

Spina should have been appreciative that, on a day when commuters were cautioned to stay home if at all possible, the teachers had made it in at all. Instead, she chastised them publicly in what some teachers and parents have described as an “uproar.” “It was disgusting,” one mom told the Staten Island Advance. No wonder the paper described Spina as “cold as ice.”

But harassing our valiant teachers apparently wasn’t enough excitement for the disciplinarian principal. She also handed out late passes to students who arrived past the school’s 8 a.m. start time, infuriating their parents, who had expected at least an ounce of sympathy on a day when average student attendance across the island was only 54 percent. Apparently, at PS 30, braving the elements isn’t enough; students and teachers must also brave Spina’s wrath.

Finally, no trip to the Educational Twilight Zone is complete without dropping by the Department of Education, where the ghost of Joel Klein — or at least of his op-eds — continues to haunt the halls. The former chancellor may have resigned last year, but that didn’t stop an employee at the DOE’s Teacher Data HELP Desk from channeling his spirit in response to a teacher’s question about the TDR verification process.

Noreen Devine, a 7th-grade English language arts teacher at the Bronx’s Young Scholars Academy, e-mailed the desk to ask what a lot of teachers completing the verification process are wondering: “Am I really supposed to be able to remember the names and classes of all of my students that I’ve had in the past five years?” As she pointed out, teachers are already busy enough. Now they’re supposed to devote time trying to recreate old student rosters and look up past students’ OSIS numbers — all so that the DOE can feel more empowered in releasing individual teacher evaluations to the press?

In a word, the response she received was “yes.” But it came with a snippy lecture on the “public’s right to know” ripped off — without attribution — from an Oct. 23 Klein op-ed in the New York Post, “Why teacher scores should be released.”

There’s new leadership at Tweed. Isn’t it time to get some new material?