It’s no secret that, here at The Curmudgeon, we have issues with public school teachers. Our view is that they want to be treated as professionals and then everything they actually do says that they are an insular, self-absorbed, group of whining narcissists.
Today is a case in point.
WEST BRANCH, Mich. – The Michigan Education Association is going to arbitration to try to force the West Branch-Rose City school district to pay a former teacher who was convicted of molesting a student a $10,000 severance buyout.
The father of the victim is outraged, calling the union’s efforts on behalf of the sex criminal “ludicrous” and saying any school money due to the teacher should go to his son, who is “out there trying to make it in this world all messed up.”
Let’s do this slowly.
- Public school teacher molests a child in his class;
- Public school teacher is charged, tried, and convicted of child molestation – he raped the boy repeatedly over a three year period;
- Public school teacher is convicted of molestation;
- Public school teacher is sentenced to 15-30 in prison.
The union says he’s entitled to a buyout of his contract. And just to add insult to injury…
The case sparked community outrage when several of the district’s teachers wrote letters of support for Erickson, pleading for a lenient sentence. A school board member, Mike Eagan, also drew the public’s ire when he sat with the Erickson family at the pedophile’s sentencing.
The community rallied by the victim’s parents, John and Lori Janczewski, to urge the school board to terminate Erickson’s supporters, but officials ultimately decided to keep the teachers out of fear of legal retaliation.
Teachers in this pedophile’s school wrote letters to the judge pleading for leniency. You just can’t make this stuff up.
This isn’t a “one time thing”. New York City has a policy of removing teachers who’ve been accused of sexual misconduct with students and placing them in a “rubber room”. That simply means they are assigned to an off-campus office with no contact with students and they still get paid for doing nothing.
He worked just one year as a full-time teacher in New York. But he has collected nearly $1 million for 13 years for doing almost nothing.
Aryeh Eller, 46, a former music teacher at Hillcrest HS in Queens, is the longest-sitting “rubber room” teacher in the city. He was yanked from the classroom in 1999 and confessed to repeated sexual harassment of female students, according to a 2000 investigative report.
But a hearing officer who decides whether tenured teachers can be fired dismissed the case, ruling that Eller wasn’t told his rights. The Department of Education, considering him unfit for teaching, put him in a holding room for a decade.
[…]
Since his 1999 suspension, he has collected $943,000, plus health and pension benefits — and the total will hit $1 million this year.
Gee, we’re sure we all agree that’s a good use of taxpayer money.
There are lot’s more stories, lot’s more, but we’ll stop here and ask the obvious (at least to us) question, “Where are the teachers – those scions of professional behavior – and why aren’t they clamoring to assign people like this to a stone pit? Or at least terminate them some sort of finality.” The teachers are apparently OK with these practices, in the Michigan case some of them actually supported their local pedophile.
Here’s a hint for you, public school teachers. If you want to have anybody believe that you really give a damn about the kids you’re supposed to be “educating” then stand up and raise hell that people like this are associated with you and your so-called profession.
Or maybe that’s just too much trouble.
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