An elementary school teacher who was late to school at least 46 times this past school year and 65 times the year before will be able to keep his job, a state arbitrator has ruled.Holy crap, are you kidding me? No one told him at any time in the last two school years that he was supposed to be on time to work?
The city school district had sought to terminate Roosevelt Elementary School math teacher Arnold Anderson as a result of his years of chronic tardiness.
Anderson told The Associated Press on Friday that breakfast is to blame for his tardiness.
"I have a bad habit of eating breakfast in the morning, and I lost track of time," he said...
While the state-appointed arbitrator slammed the teacher's flimsy excuses and found that “there is no doubt the district has proven conduct unbecoming,” the teacher will be allowed to return to the classroom in January, albeit only after serving an unpaid suspension until then. Anderson earns about $90,000 per year with 14 years of experience...
In Anderson’s case, the arbitrator said the district failed to provide the teacher with due process by providing him with a formal notice of inefficiency or by giving him 90 days to correct his failings.
Teachers unions like to point out that administrators should be documenting, documenting, documenting, and then, when there's enough documentation, it might be OK to fire a teacher. IF no administrator warned the guy in the last two years, then yes, they screwed up. Does that excuse this teacher's behavior, though? Does it justify his keeping a $90,000-a-year job? Is "conduct unbecoming a professional teacher", repeatedly and over an extended period of time, not enough to get fired? Sometimes I wonder what, besides self satisfaction, I get from having high personal standards.
2 comments:
I've always been curious about those folks who coast by and never get non-renewed. I'm one of those teachers who crosses t's, dot's eyes and runs off duplicates just in case. I show up early, stay late, volunteer. I do the heavy lifting when it's called for. Yet I see others who skim the cream, brown nose the right folks, leave early every day and still seem to do just fine. But then again this goes along with my theory that rather than working hard and saving money, my husband and I would have been better off to run up all our credit cards, do what we want, default on our mortgage and get bailed out. That's what winning seems to look like now.
IF no administrator warned the guy in the last two years, then yes, they screwed up.
No administrator warned him. That was established in the case. The administrator should be fired to make the point.
And then the new one can warn the teacher in writing and get the SOB fired.
However, I was just speaking with an administrator at a school in one of Maryland counties, and he told me that he wonders why bother. He documented, documented, documented and got an incompetent teacher fired.
And now, a few years later, the school system hired the teacher again.
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