http://www.care2.com/causes/education/blog/no-more-rubber-rooms-for-nyc-teachers/It's no secret that dismissing a teacher in the New York City Public School system can take years. This fact is illustrated best by the so-called "rubber rooms." It is in these "rubber rooms" where the system warehouses teachers and administrators who have been removed from classrooms and offices. Currently 650 NYC school employees languish in these quasi-detention centers, where they wile away their contract days reading, surfing the Internet or playing cards.
However, a recent agreement reached by school officials and the AFT (American Teacher's Federation) will put an end to the waste of manpower and money. NYC currently spends about $30 million per year on salaries and benefits for employees are who in the disciplinary system and not allowed to work.
Terms of the new deal state that teachers/administrators on involuntary leave due to disciplinary action or investigation, will be assigned administrative or other duties within their school that does not permit them contact with students.
The length of time some teachers spend in these rubber rooms can be measured in years, due partly to the fact the NYC district has only 23 investigators. In order to clear the backlog of pending cases, NYC officials agreed to increase the number of investigators to 39, hoping to resolve all pending cases by the end of the year. Also, new deadlines have been imposed with the Dept. of Education. They now have only 10 days to file incompetence charges and 60 days to file misconduct charges, or teachers will be sent back to their classrooms.
I taught in a very small school district when compared to NYC public schools, but I can't recall any disciplinary case that ever took years to resolve. In fact, most cases were resolved within a matter of weeks. The teachers' union was quite pro-active in its assistance, taking the position that members/employees who broke rules should be dealt with quickly, for their sake, and the sake of the reputation of all teachers in the district.
So adamant was our union when it came to disciplinary matters, it would charge members for legal services if investigations revealed the teacher was at fault. But the union defended, without charge, those who were found innocent of wrong-doing after the due process.
"If you come to the union for help," I was told by more than one union building rep, "you'd better be in the right."
I won't pretend there aren't bad teachers in the ranks, people who have no business being around children at all let alone teaching them, but there are also principals who target teachers for personal reasons and level accusations that have no merit. According to reports, some of the teachers in New York's rubber rooms are victims of simply speaking up about abuses in classrooms during test taking, or openly questioning the effectiveness of policy. In my experience, administrators sometimes treat their teachers in a manner similar to the one they adopt with the students. The younger the age of the child being taught, the more likely the teacher is to be treated like a child.
In my fifth year as a teacher, I ran afoul of my building principal for reasons that still aren't all that clear to me. She was having personal difficulties because her husband had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and it took very little to ruffle her sense of importance. The hard feelings between us escalated to a point where I had to seek help from my district supervisor. He warned my principal that she was behaving unprofessionally and the problems disappeared.
I was fortunate because, though I was very young, I had a good reputation and was confident enough to stand up for myself and take appropriate steps. I also had a good supervisor whose own reputation was enough to bring my principal back to reality. But what happened to me wasn't uncommon back then and still goes on today. There are good reasons why due process, unions and contractual rules about dismissing teachers, exist.
The media loves to use rubber rooms in NYC as a blanket condemnation of teacher tenure, and the supposed need for teachers to be subject to the "real" work world rules that permit firing employees at will. I have only limited personal experience in jobs outside education, but I listen to the descriptions my family and friends give about their own workplaces, and it seems to me there are many people in need of termination in just about every profession. Favoritism, nepotism and supervisors who can't be bothered to slog through the termination process are problems of employment in general, not just in teaching.
New York's rubber rooms, however, were not a good idea and it's about time steps were taken to get rid of them.
Topic: No More Rubber Rooms for NYC Teachers (Read 976 times)