Remember the movie “Teachers,” with Judd Hirsch as the principle and Nick Nolte as a noble teacher? In the movie, one sign of the principal’s corruption was when he allowed a teacher who had sex with a student to quietly resign.
From The Oregonian:
It would take months for the agency that licenses Oregon teachers to discipline a Salem-area teacher for inappropriately touching at least eight girls.
To get Kenneth John Cushing, then 44, away from Claggett Creek Middle School students immediately, administrators cut him a deal: If Cushing resigned, they would conceal his alleged conduct — clutching students’ waists, touching their buttocks and massaging their shoulders — from the public.
Cushing signed the pact — obtained by The Oregonian through public records requests — with Salem-Keizer Public Schools in 2004, and officials promised not to reveal the teacher’s behavior if potential employers called looking for a reference. They would attribute his departure to “personal reasons,” the document reads, and make “no reference to this agreement.”
Salem’s deal is just one of 47 similar confidential settlement agreements obtained or confirmed by the newspaper.
During the past five years, nearly half of Oregon teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct with a child left their school districts with confidential agreements. Most, like Cushing’s, promised to keep alleged abuse quiet. Some promised cash settlements, health insurance and letters of recommendation as incentives for a resignation.
The practice is so widespread, school officials across the country call it “passing the trash.”
Back in the Communist days in Bulgaria, there were laws that allowed for the prosecution of a citizen that had been aware of a crime, and failed to notify law enforcement. It did not cover all crimes – the rule of thumb was that if the crime would land the offended in one of the ‘light regime’ jails, the silent witnesses were safe. Light regime jails let inmates work in a number of regular factories, receive unlimited visitations after hours, keep private property in their cells, etc…
In any case, this law is no longer. It was declared an affront to human dignity, yada, yada, yada… So I assume that such laws do not exist in the United States, and that what the schools did is not illegal. Otherwise, it would be folly to commit the agreement to writing.
The person in charge has to make the decision. What are his goals? He has to protect the students in his charge from the offender, and he has to keep himself safe from retribution. If the solution described above is so common, it must be a rather effective way of dealing with the situation.
What are the positives? The administrators’ students are immediately rid of the molester. The school avoids lawsuits from the teacher who will defend his innocence, from the parents who don’t want a suspected predator near their kids, etc… A scandal tarnishing the school’s name is also avoided.
What are the negatives? There are a few, but the major one is that the teacher, who is very likely guilty, is just moved to new hunting grounds.
Once again, this practice would not be widespread unless the existing laws made it the rational choice. Of course, these laws exist to protect the children from molesters, and it is damn clear that the students, in general, are left vulnerable.
What can be changed? What would you do if you could rewrite the law? You could take the totalitarian approach and make it a crime to conceal the molester’s activity. You could also remove all liability for those who make the accusation, and make sure that the school cannot be prosecuted for throwing the accused out. You could pass all incurred expenses to the taxpayer at large, and by that I do not mean just those whose property taxes fund that particular school. You could make this a special case where the burden of proof is lightened. You could increase the penalties for the teacher’s abuse of his power over his students. And of course, I am sure I missing many other approaches.
I would fully support some of the above… and I think others are truly bad ideas. All of them have negatives. I am honestly curious as to what the posters here think would work.
By the way, I do not believe that this practice can be blamed on the patriarchal society, or on the willingness of men to protect those who pray on females. The actions of the offender, yes. But the blame for the administrators’ “solution” lays with the imperfect laws.
The scary part of this article is not that administrators cut a deal with the accused. They are, after all, doing what’s best for the students under their care — at the expense of other students, granted, but it’s not an indefensible choice.
The scary part is that it would take months for the licensing agency to discipline the guy.
Petar asks what could be changed. The first thing I would change would be to allow (or encourage or require) administrators to put the accused on confidential paid leave until the disciplinary process comes to a resolution. This protects the students, while reducing the impact as much as possible on the accused.
Failing that, it seems like the administrators might agree to make no mention of the accusations, *provided* the accused doesn’t apply for a job working with children.
that’s still better than what happened to a similar teacher at my middle school – nothing. as far as I know he’s still there.
If the practice of “passing the trash” is so widespread, it makes me curious to know if there are subtle ways many school adminstrators cue each other in when checking references, or if the usual outcome is an easy new job somewhere else.
from the lawsuits I’ve seen when parents at the new school go digging into the employment history, it’s a new job somewhere else, not enough questuins ask
To get Kenneth John Cushing, then 44, away from Claggett Creek Middle School students immediately,
I’m not buying this. Not at all. These administrators are claiming that they made this devil’s deal to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. This is starting to rival patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. If a school administrator thought that a teacher was a threat to the pupils, I refuse to believe that they couldn’t have that teacher pulled out of the classroom immediately.
Now, they would certainly have to keep paying the teacher while due process and administrative procedures were performed. And they’d have to risk a counter-suit and answer questions in public about what happened and about whether or not the school both had and followed proper procedures to minimize the risk of this kind of thing happening. I propose that these, and not a desire to PROTECT THE CHILDREN, were the true reasons why they cut a deal with this guy.
And finally, if their desire was to protect children, what about the children in his next assignment? These people have sold their souls to protect their jobs. They don’t stand for a damn thing but expediency and self-preservation. Certainly the principles of protecting the public trust and putting personal integrity over employment means nothing to them. Disgusting.
“The scary part of this article is not that administrators cut a deal with the accused. They are, after all, doing what’s best for the students under their care — at the expense of other students, granted, but it’s not an indefensible choice. ”
Ummm, I’m sorry, but I think it IS an indefensible choice. It’s just like the Catholic church sex abuse cover-up. Cover up of children being inappropriately touched in NEVER excusable or understandable.
What if they guy applies for a job working with children, but doesn’t put the school district down as a reference? He could put down a previous school as a reference. There would be no record of his misconduct, and he would be free to do as he pleases. When someone does something wrong to children, you take action, you don’t fucking cover it up. End of story.
This happens in other areas than just education.
When taking a management training course here in Georgia while working at a state institution we were being taught about the proper way to document disciplinary and hiring procedures as the best way to assure fair treatment and compliance with EEOC laws. The example of a completely wrong way to do things involved a hospital where patients (I can’t recall if it was children, disabled patients, or what, but it was patients who were especially vulnerable) were abused by a staff member. The staff member offered to resign quietly if they would clear the staff member’s personnel file of all record of the charges. In order to avoid a scandal the hospital administration agreed to this. Later the ex-staffer used the hospital as a reference for a similar position elsewhere. Someone at the original hospital who was aware of the misconduct made it clear exactly what had happened so that the ex-staffer was refused the new job. The ex-staffer sued the original hospital for making false statements (or something like that) and they lost because they had no documentation to back up their claims since they had cleaned out the personnel file. This was probably close to 20 years ago when the example was given to my class and it had obviously happened long enough before that that the entire sequence of events had played out.
As for how to fix it, honesty would go a long way, but it is obvious that that is an increasingly rare trait in our modern “civilized” world.
Petar, not following your argument here. Sending a predator to new hunting grounds is not a “rational choice given the laws”. The school administrators would be making a gamble that the teacher will not get caught at the new school, that victims at their own school will never complain, and that if the teacher ever is called out, that nobody will look back at his or her career. In other words, instead of being the school that promptly cut a bad teacher loose and acted to protect children, they’re the school that pulled a cover-up.
You can see how well that worked out for the Catholic Church.
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Normal. School administrators have become so utterly cowed by teachers’ unions that they have just given up on ever dealing with problematic teachers in an “official” capacity. Conservatives love to blame the unions for this – but the point is that there _is_ a process for handling these teachers, albeit a complicated one… but schools end up just taking the easier way out and just pass the trash.
I see no one wants to probe the elephant in the living room: false accusations. Such an accusation, even when false, destroys a teacher’s reputation. When the accusation first surfaces, the administrator cannot know whether it is true or not. The choice is to pursue it and risk losing a good teacher, or keep it under wraps, move the teacher (and the mystery) on to another town, and hope that the kid was lying.
grunion, the possibility of false accusations is why, although you would put some kind of restriction on the teacher being accused, you would have to investigate the accusation thoroughly before initiating any legal action or terminating the teacher. I’ve had kids threaten to make accusations of child abuse against me just because they were pissed off. Fortunately they’ve never carried them out.
Silenced is Foo; yes, there is a problem for handling teachers you want to get rid of, whether it’s for this kind of cause or if it’s for incompetence. The problem is that even when completely justified it takes a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of effort. Our local elementary/middle school school board had about 3 teachers it wanted to fire. One was to the point that whenever the class schedule came out every year, 1/2 the parents of the kids assigned to her would call the Principal demanding that their kids be reassigned to someone else’s class. The reason they didn’t do it was the huge demand on the administration and the school board to document/justify it and the $25,000 – $50,000 it would cost. It was easier to just let it all slide. That’s indefensible when you’re talking about child abuse. It’s no excuse, but it’s a reason.