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Topics in the News:
management malfeasance
“We have a no-bullying rule for the schools,” parent Heidi Rotondo told Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott at a District 21 Community Education Council town hall meeting on Jan. 11. “So what are you doing about the principal at PS 90 who’s doing the bullying?”
Lisa Capece scored an enormous victory against the bullying, harassing and intimidation practices performed by Diane Gordin, the principal of PS 1 in Staten Island. I taught in New York City for more than 35 years, more than 20 of those at PS 1. My last year there, 2003-2004, Gordin became my assistant principal with Terri Rosenberg as principal.
Anyone wondering why teachers need a fair appeals process when their livelihoods are threatened should consider the case of Lisa Capece, an untenured teacher on Staten Island whose principal unfairly terminated her four years ago. The injustice was so blatant that a state judge ordered the city Department of Education to rehire her with full back pay, interest, tenure and seniority.
What a difference a school year makes! In 2008-2009, PS 118 in Hollis, Queens, earned straight As on its School Progress Report. By the next year, it had sunk to two Fs and a D. It did little better last year. What happened? Parents and teachers blame Principal Cynthia Ofori-Feaster. Since her arrival in 2009, fear stalks the halls, they say.
For more than five years, the Department of Education has turned a deaf ear to the persistent complaints of the staff that PS 22 Principal Carlen Padmore-Gateau has harassed, humiliated and driven teachers out of the Prospect Park school.
The Columbus complex school community rallied on Jan. 10 in support of embattled teachers at the campus’ Bronxdale HS to protest the Department of Education’s mild disciplining of Principal John Chase Jr., who is accused of a string of lewd remarks to female staff in his one semester on the job.
A Department of Education official has been reprimanded for enlisting parent coordinators last March to rally parents behind an effort to end teacher seniority rules.
Richard Bost, the principal of Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology, has been the subject of several sexual harassment charges by female staff, students and parents since 2009. He has a record of taking actions that his critics allege were retaliatory.
Principal Ron Smolkin’s relations with staff at Manhattan’s Independence HS were always frosty, teachers say. But they turned arctic last spring after the school’s faculty leadership team made a series of ambitious recommendations on safety, teaching, guidance, consensus and collegiality.
In the 2008-2009 school year, the staff of PS 22 in Prospect Heights voted no confidence by 49 to 3 in their principal, Carlen Padmore-Gateau. The list of charges was long: failure to report safety incidences, violations of the discipline code, neglect of English language learners, failure to honor modifications to students’ IEPs or to notify parents of assessments and failure to respond promptly to emergencies.
The Department of Education on March 16 directed its employees to get students and parents involved in the all-out war that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the chancellor have been mounting in Albany against teachers’ seniority rights.
Overzealous principals are a dime a dozen in the Educational Twilight Zone, but one of them — Gary Williams in Brooklyn’s Borough Park — has really outdone himself. Apparently Williams fancies himself a sort of James Bond, using a motion detector to guard his office, and a hidden camera pencil sharpener, an appropriate choice for the principal of the SEEALL Academy.
Parents attending open school night at MS 216 in Fresh Meadows, Queens, on Feb. 17 got a primer on their school’s principal, whom the teachers call “insufferable” and “vindictive.” “We can’t do our jobs or serve your children with this principal in charge,” one teacher told a parent of a 7th-grader.
The UFT has asked the state attorney general to investigate whether the Department of Education is violating state education law requiring it to provide “equal educational opportunity for all” when it pursued the very policies that a consulting firm had warned in 2008 would result in higher rates of academic failure.
The Department of Education likes to carp — all facts to the contrary — about how it can’t fire teachers who misbehave or aren’t performing up to snuff. Meanwhile, it treats with leniency out-of-control principals who have wreaked havoc on their schools. Three recent cases illustrate the glaring double standard.
Fordham HS Principal Iris Blige strong-armed assistant principals to “get rid of” nearly a dozen teachers on her “hit list” by giving them unmerited U-ratings, a report from the city’s Office of Special Investigation found. Despite the finding, the Department of Education chose to keep Blige in her job and slap her with a $7,500 fine.
PS 139 in Flatbush, under a previous principal, was one of 100 high-performing schools in the city. Then came a new principal, Mary McDonald, and eight years later, the large pre-K-5 school is a shadow of its former self. “McDonald opened the window and threw out every program that made it a top-100 school,” said one veteran teacher.
Call him the man who disappeared. Jason Kovac, the principal of PS 14 in the Bronx, whose intimidation of and disrespect for his staff were the subject of an article in the New York Teacher [Dec.16] resigned his Throggs Neck school post on Dec. 15 just after the paper went to press.
Staff at PS 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, have something to crow about in getting the Department of Education to remove their own bête noir of a principal in mid-November.
Lower Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS used to be known as a high-performing school tailored to business majors. Now it’s seen more as a troubled school, which recently drew media attention after a Dec. 8 fight between two students escalated into what the press called a “riot.”
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