Labor Spotlight

Teachers the real heroes at Brooklyn

by Jim Callaghan

Mar 2, 2006 11:23 AM

At the end of the school day, Brooklyn Technical HS Principal Lee McCaskill would drive his Jaguar home to Piscataway, N.J.

His commute took him over the Verrazano Bridge and through Staten Island, where he took another bridge to his suburban home nestled on a bucolic cul de sac about 40 miles from the crowded streets of Fort Greene.

McCaskill, who fancied himself the general of his school, took his last drive from Brooklyn Tech after he was forced to retire when he admitted that he failed to pay the $5,300 annual fee for registering his daughter in a New York City school. He had stiffed the city out of nearly $20,000 and worse — as the special investigator’s report details — lied to investigators. [See “Special investigator releases scathing report on McCaskill”.]

He resigned just two days after another set of investigators showed up at the school, laden with subpoenas demanding the school’s financial records concerning monies collected for advanced placement tests. And he “retired” just one month after he threatened Howie Gleich, the chapter leader, with “war” if the New York Teacher ran the story about his scam.

McCaskill was a schoolyard bully, harassing and intimidating teachers, inventing bogus charges of corporal punishment and insubordination, and driving brilliant teachers out of the school.

And even when UFT President Randi Weingarten visited him last May to talk to him about the harassment and tell him she would not stop her advocacy, including exposing the Tech problems in the New York Teacher, he defiantly told her: “Bring it on!”

The divide between McCaskill and his staff was wider than the two bodies of water he crossed daily as he retreated to his bunker, even as investigators of his own department were closing in on him.

Sadly, his supporters in the school resorted to a centuries-old shibboleth in explaining his troubles: it was the Jews’ fault. Another supporter, a local newspaper columnist whose sister served under McCaskill as an assistant principal, claimed the UFT was racist in going after a black principal.

The real heroes of this story are the courageous Tech teachers who took their case to the public in full knowledge that McCaskill would retaliate — which he did.

They proved wrong F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote: “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” They prevailed, and McCaskill is finally gone.

Through the years of tyranny and abuse, the Tech teachers — though bullied and frightened — showed their strength and never gave up. They knew how wily McCaskill could be and were aware that when cornered, he would always blame someone else.

In the end, even under oath, he shifted the blame for his misdeeds to his wife, saying she registered their daughter at PS 29. However, the PS 29 principal contradicted him, saying that it was McCaskill himself who made the phone call to get his daughter into the school.

One former Brooklyn Tech teacher remembers the same scenario when she reported that another teacher had received sexually explicit e-mails from McCaskill. The principal blamed his brother and convinced city investigators that his brother had his password and, coincidentally, the private e-mail addresses of women teachers.

McCaskill escaped that violation, but the teacher got a U rating and was hounded by Reyes Irizarry, who was the superintendent for Brooklyn and Staten Island high schools at the time and who is now superintendent of Region 4. He wrote that the teacher, in reporting the vile e-mails, “engaged in conduct unbecoming to the profession.”

The tyrannical principal had an arsenal of weapons which he used at his whim against his devoted staff. His favorite was the U rating, complete with trumped-up charges, some more serious than others. If that didn’t work, he would call in his assistant principal, Tracy Atkins-Zoughlami, who would run after teachers in the halls and scream at them in front of students or who would ask for weeks and weeks of teacher lesson plans — simply to wear a teacher down.

In the most bizarre twist of fate imaginable, given the circumstances of his demise, he resorted to accusing teachers of embezzlement. Not one of his smarmy charges stuck.

He trashed the First Amendment in accusing a teacher of assigning what McCaskill claimed was a pornographic book (“Continental Drift,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), but allowed Assistant Principal Atkins-Zoughlami to assign a book to her classes which portrayed men having sex with animals.

What kept the teachers going was their dedication and the knowledge that they were right.

“In college,” Roberta Lehrman said, “I loved reading, writing and speaking about literature.” She struggled to pass that along to her students while McCaskill disrupted the lives of her colleagues. “I tried not to let the reign of terror interfere with my teaching.”

Gleich, a graduate of New Utrecht HS, said: “I always loved biology — I was pre-med until I fell in love with teaching,” which he has been doing for nearly 30 years. He described the McCaskill reign of terror as “resulting in the turning off of teachers, who would leave the building as quickly as possible after school.

“For me, even as my students and classes and programs got better, there was no longer any enjoyment in coming to Tech. I was tired of seeing good teachers and really nice people being destroyed. I was tired of students being shortchanged on their futures.”

Dan Baldwin took a circuitous route to teaching. After trying acting, copywriting, sales, real estate and bartending, he said: “I found my niche in teaching. Oddly, though, everything I did in my life prior to my going into teaching seemed to prepare me for teaching.

“When I came to Brooklyn Tech, I felt ... ‘Oh, so this is why I did everything I did, why everything happened to me the way that it did ... so that I could come here, now, and be prepared for this moment.’ My students at Tech made me. I felt, immediately when I came to Tech, that I was where I was supposed to be. I was home.”

Also for these three, a strong union background helped.

“My father was a union member when I was a child,” Lehrman said. “He taught me never to cross a picket line. My Uncle Jack was a member of the Teamsters, and I remember him striking several times, and worrying about how he would pay his bills.”

Gleich was “raised to support and be a union person by my father. I have always supported and been part of the union.”

Baldwin remembered that in the neighborhood where he grew up, “in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx in the late ’50s and early ’60s, there were very strong pro-union sentiments.”

Lehrman’s advice for teachers caught in similar vises of harassment is to keep anecdotal records for documentation. She said teachers should be as emotionless as possible and just report what happened.

“They should answer every letter in their file with a serious response and they should tell the truth always,” Lehrman said. “When you lie, you have to remember it. When you tell the truth, it’s easy to remember.”

Gleich said that teachers need to become active in their chapter, particularly in problem schools. “They need to elect a good chapter leader and then support her or him in all their doings,” he said. “This is where being part of a union is very important.”

Teachers should stay unified, Baldwin added. “That’s why they call it a union,” he said. “In unity there is political and emotional strength. Stick together and never give up.”

Through it all, the members remained steadfast. They reached out to investigators, the media, parents, alumni, and the union staff.

They didn’t ask, “What’s the union doing for us?” because they understood, innately, that they were the union: as individual dues payers and as a group.

When the first New York Teacher article (“Brooklyn Wreck”) appeared in the Oct. 6 issue, Robert Hardmond, a social studies teacher, asked for 2,000 reprints to be handed out at Open School Night, a gathering that attracted Weingarten, UFT vice presidents Frank Volpicella and Michael Mulgrew, and other union officers, as well as parents, graduates and former teachers from as far away as Pennsylvania.

Without realizing it, the Tech heroes were writing history in the best traditions of the founders of our union, some of whom still show up for work every day and make the UFT staff members feel privileged to be in their midst.

The next time you hear the mantra of the defeated, “What are ya gonna do?” whether on your street or in a union meeting, tell the cynic about the Brooklyn Tech heroes who were unwilling to suffer fools gladly. Tell them how these heroes helped take down a tyrant.

When the “war” he threatened finally came, the general of Fort Greene Place, Lee McCaskill, deserted.

McCaskill had never met an adversary like the UFT led by Randi Weingarten. She had her own secret weapons: her perseverance and her anger about how our members were being harassed.

And the truth.