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For well over two years now, Bronx gym teacher and coach Dan Smith has been sidelined in one of the Department of Education's infamous "rubber rooms," thanks to an allegation of sexual misconduct in March 2007. But while other teachers (over 600 hundred of them!) use their rubber room time to play Sudoku and nap, Smith has been hatching a plan to get out.
Yesterday Smith filed a federal lawsuit against the DOE for an unspecified amount of money and for the right to get out of the rubber room and go back to work. His lawyer claims it took a year before the DOE filed charges against him, and says Smith has been told "he won't have his hearings for another two years, so four or five years [in the rubber room]."
Smith and his lawyer contend the misconduct allegation was "trumped up" by administrators at Dodge High School to retaliate against Smith for speaking to the Daily News about unequal funding for the girls' sports teams. Last year Smith told the News, "My attorney said (the Dept. of Education) is going to ask for me to retire or resign, but I don't intend to do that. I'm not guilty of this charge, and this should have been deemed unfounded. The only reason it's not is because they have a hidden agenda and ulterior motives. ... I'm not making any deals. I want my name restored."
A female student claims Smith told her to sit on his lap during gym class, but Smith tells WABC, "I have something I normally I say and that's 'take a lap and sit on your spot.' Students are normally assigned floor spots, and she said, 'I have to sit on your lap.' I said, 'No. You heard what I said." Smith claims his constitutional rights are being violated by the rubber room banishment, and adds, "I can't understand why the taxpayers of this city are not outraged by what's going on. You can't get your day in court. You can't even be heard."
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he's got a valid point. no accusation without trial. meanwhile we taxpayers pay salaries to those "accused" teachers stranded in the rubber palace because of this idiotic policy.
the DOE and UFT can both shove it.
and there needs to be a better way of dealing with accusations of sexual abuse in schools. decent people can be ruined at the whim of an adolescent, it's out of control.
If they had evidence, they would have plea bargained this thing out. It's obvious they've got nothing to go to trial with. No evidence, no case. The end.
Why would he tell a student to sit on his lap in front of the whole class? It makes zero sense, and if it really happened, one would think other students would back it up.
The entire process to fire a tenured NYC teacher is 7 long steps. It costs a lot of time and money. Therefore, it might be cheaper to pay them to rot in the rubber room as some are near retirement and some will just quit.
that's false economy, because as taxpayers we get no return on our investment from those rubber roomies. better to get to the bottom of the complaint expeditiously and fire them or, if deemed innocent, get them back to work ASAP. it's the long drawn out process that is the problem.
The New Yorker had a really good article about the Rubber Rooms back in August:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill
We need to begin looking at what the Department of Education really does on a day to day basis. I see it as a bloated, ineffectual and callous black hole for teachers and parents that is destroying public education in NYC. Not to mention that nutty budget of theirs.
The problem is that creating logic and efficiency at Klein's DOE is not fit the Bloomberg paradigm of blame the teachers. It's going to take a few more stories like this - and a Lui audit - to make a difference.