Crooked teachers cash in big-time as ax slowly falls
This is the third in a four-part series shining a light on the opaque system of school-employee disciplinary hearings, which for years have been criticized as slow, costly and ineffective at removing misbehaving or incompetent personnel.
Today's article looks at investigation-backed cases of teacher misbehavior that took the school system years to resolve.
Tomorrow's story will look at recent agreements and proposed steps aimed at fixing the problem-plagued system.
There's no such thing as a slam-dunk case.
Even when investigations confirm wrongdoing by teachers, it can take the city's Department of Education years -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars per case -- to bounce wayward educators from the school system, a review of disciplinary hearings shows.
Among the absurd cases that highlight the costly and dysfunctional system overseen by the DOE is that of Bronx teacher Barbara Lee.
In August 2005, probers from the DOE's Office of Special Investigations confirmed that Lee, a teacher at PS 91, had helped students cheat on state math tests in May 2004.
The students were so shocked by their teacher's behavior -- including pointing to correct answers or writing them in herself -- that one passed a note to another reading "Look what she's doing," according to the OSI probe.
Lee fought her termination by saying students had confused a practice test with the real exam and she denied providing answers.
Remarkably, it took nearly five years -- until May 2010 -- for the city to terminate Lee.
During that time stretch -- which arose largely from a lethargic bureaucracy short on arbitrators and beset with a backlog of cases -- the Bronx educator was paid nearly $360,000 without teaching a single lesson.
"This whole system is very, very flawed," said Jay Worona, chief counsel for the New York State School Boards Association, which is pushing for reforms to the hearings process.
He said one solution would be to cap payments to suspended teachers, to remove a possible incentive to drag out their cases.
"We don't want to be unfair to educators, we want to be fair to kids," said Worona.
But several cases -- such as that of East New York Family Academy teacher Ebenezer Amu -- suggest that the Department of Education was the one that failed to quickly move the cases to hearing.
In August 2006, Amu was found to have called in sick on several occasions while he had actually been traveling abroad, according to a probe by the city's special commissioner of investigation.
Not only was Amu not terminated until four years later -- in August 2010 -- but case documents show that the first hearing on his case wasn't held until April 2010.
In that four-year gap, Amu earned nearly $300,000 in taxpayer funds largely because officials didn't conform to state timelines governing the process -- something the city attributes to a backlog of hundreds of cases that has since been cleared.
CASE NO. 1
Name: Ebenezer Amu
School: East New York Family
Academy, Brooklyn
Probe result: Special Commissioner of Investigation confirmed in August 2006 that Amu had exhibited a pattern of calling in sick while on vacation abroad.
Pulled from classroom: August 2006
Termination date : August 2010
Length and cost of removal: Four years, $292,000
CASE NO. 2
Name: Renee Morrell
School: PS 197, Bronx
Probe result: Office of Special Investigations found in September 2006 that she had punched and kicked a 12-year-old special education student.
Salary: $85,500
Pulled from classroom: September 2006
Termination date: May 2010
Length and cost of removal: Nearly four years, $313,500
CASE NO. 3
Name: Barbara Lee
School: PS 91, Bronx
Probe results: Office of Special Investigations confirmed in August 2005 that she helped kids cheat on state math tests.
Salary: $76,000
Pulled from classroom: September 2005
Termination date: May 2010
Length and cost of removal: Nearly five years, $354,000
CASE NO. 4
Name: Terri Patterson
School: PS 8, Brooklyn
Probe result: Special Commissioner of Investigation found in December 2007 that Patterson had been falsifying her address for three years in order to avoid paying New York City taxes.
Salary: $70,000
Pulled from classroom: May 2008
Termination date: August 2010; ruling was overturned in court this month
Length and cost of removal: Three years, $210,000
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