A Charmed Life!

I have a very close friend who is a bilingual special education teacher who worked in Southern Queens  and was brought up on 3020-a charges of corporal punishment and was terminated by an Arbitrator who was under pressure from the DOE which had reminded him that he was too lenient on a previous case.  The teacher appealed the unfair and shocking ruling and a judge agreed that the Arbitrator used an uncharged specification as part of the basis for the termination and remanded it to a different Arbitrator since the judge didn't think the teacher would get a fair hearing from the original Arbitrator. The City had appealed the judge's decision to the Appellate Court and then delayed their submission as long as they could since the teacher was not on the DOE payroll.  This month the Appellate Court will finally hear the case and hopefully my friend will get her job back, with back pay.  However, that is another story for another day.  This post is about the paraprofessional who was responsible for my friend's unfair termination.

The paraprofessional is one of these people that no teacher wanted to work with,  She was known to take a long lunch and bathroom breaks, leave school at a moment's notice, and was unreliable.  My friend had tried to replace her with a paraprofessional who was more dependable but the Principal refused to change paras since no other teacher wanted to work with her.  Therefore, my friend was stuck with the paraprofessional, let's call her Miss. Nasty.  Miss. Nasty was the prime witness against my friend and embellished the corporal punishment charge despite the denials from my friend and the other paraprofessional who was in the room at the time of the alleged corporal punishment incident. For those who want to know if the child testified?  The child did not!

My friend had a history with Miss. Nasty that resulted in my friend going to the Principal to ask for another para, any para but Miss. Nasty.  However, the Principal, who was forced to retire shortly thereafter, was a personal friend and Miss. Nasty would do the Principal's hair during school time.  Yes, instead of being with the most vulnerable of children, Misss. Nasty was running errands or doing favors for the Principal.

Now it seems in April of this year that Miss. Nasty was seen by both children and adults choking a sixth grade boy and threatening the same boy by allegedly saying "do you  want to go a round"? The corporal punishment incident was reported  to the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) not by the school's Administration but by a parent who's daughter had witnessed the incident and was so upset that she immediately called her mother and told her that Miss. Nasty was choking the boy.  In almost all cases when a staff member is accused of choking a student they are removed from the classroom.  However, what has happened to Miss. Nasty?  Nothing, nothing at all.  That's right Miss. Nasty is still in the classroom almost a month after the alleged corporal punishment incident was reported.  Obviously, Miss. Nasty is being protected by the school's Administration who failed to report the corporal punishment incident in the first place.  I wonder if they are being investigated by OSI for their failure to follow the rules?   While the OSI investigation is still open, nobody expects anything to come from it since the school's Administration is protecting her.  Miss. Nasty, who lied and embellished a corporal punishment incident that resulted in a great teacher losing her job seems to have a charmed life when it comes to her own job.