this dairy is based on this article: Teachers Skip Past Sex Cases
How are things like THIS happening!?
Education officials at every level do not know how many teachers have been investigated for sexual abuse or how many they have sent back to classrooms.
To find out, the Herald-Tribune reviewed the results of more 14,000 teacher investigations going back as far as 1997.
The analysis shows that more than 300 teachers have been punished in recent years for sexual misconduct - molesting students, seducing them, having them pose nude or lavishing them with unwanted attention. Nearly 450 more physically attacked or verbally terrorized their students.
More than half of those teachers kept their license to teach. At least 150 are teaching in Florida classrooms today.
More after the fold
The answer appears to be that there is a bureaucratic mess in the Florida education system.
First, some of the language used in the various laws/ordinances/policies tends to be vague.
What does "moral turpitude" and "gross immorality" mean? Each school district makes its own decision. Which, of course, is not necessarily the same in each district. So actions that one district feels is a "firing" offence, another might only think that it only needs some "counseling".
Helping the situation is:
While principals often are left to decide what specific acts are banned, union contracts, judicial rulings and lawyers ensure a teacher's rights are protected.
Second, The Florida DOE only has 12 investigators whose job is to gather enough evidence to punish bad teachers. But that job does NOT require training in investigations.
So what happens when a case is brought in front of the Department of Education and its affiliated Education Practices Commission which gives teacher's their certificate?
The state can revoke a teacher's certificate - essentially ending a career - for a range of actions that violate the code of conduct teachers agree to follow.
But they rarely do.
why?
But the head of that office, Marian Lambeth, said there is little she can do to reduce the number of abusive teachers making it back into classrooms because of the legal hurdles her employees face.
Often, state investigators just don't have enough evidence to justify a revocation, Lambeth said.
Hmmm... I wonder how many of those 14,000 investigations were dropped for similar reasons...
The example from the article on how this broken system works.
Tara Wright was hired as a teacher in 1996. Her assignment: teaching at a second-chance high school and she became the cheerleader coach.
But rumors about her meetings off-campus with boys continued. Later that school year, a boy told another teacher he had sex with Wright.
The principal and school district investigators did their job.
They took a statement from at least one boy who said he had sex with Wright. One father told Orange County school district investigators that Wright had slept with all three of his sons.
Wright lost her job, and district administrators forwarded the case to the Department of Education.
In 2000, after the students in question had moved away, the state gave up on the investigation and offered her a deal.
If she signed a settlement agreement, they would retroactively "suspend" her certificate for the 1998-99 school year and place her certificate on probation.
Less than a year after the settlement agreement, she asked Hernando County schools for a job.
How to fix this?
Well, standardization on the definitions of "moral turpitude" and "gross immorality" would help. That way everyone knows what the limits are.
But, the main problem is the lack of investigators. That needs to be improved, both in training and in the simple numbers of investigators.
Of course, both of those require that the politicians in charge of the local school boards and the state DOE have the will to change the system, without that... nothing will change.
thank you for reading
jeff