MY TURN-The recent decision by LAUSD's General Counsel David Holmquist to no longer require the housing of teachers at LAUSD offices during school hours, while teachers were under supposed investigation of the charges against them, seems to pose more questions than it answers.
If it's okay now to allow these teachers to remain at home, what is different? Why couldn't this have been done years ago, instead of the mass incarceration of teachers who should have been presumed innocent until proven guilty by the District in a neutral forum, where LAUSD- and not the teacher- had the obligation of showing culpable actions on the part of the teacher in a timely manner and not the purposefully protracted process designed to break teachers will and ability to defend their innocence.
If Holmquist now feels it’s okay to allow teachers to be housed at their homes, why has he done a complete about face on this issue, what has changed?
Why in the recent past have some teachers been kept incarcerated for over 4 years, while the charges against them were supposedly being investigated, but now it’s okay to let them be at home during the school work day?
In the past, LAUSD justified the ‘incarceration’ of teachers as motivated by protecting students from these alleged bad/immoral teachers. As a matter of course, LAUSD has hit almost every teacher it goes after with an alleged violation of California Education Code 44939- a morals charge. This is done so that teachers can be ultimately deprived of salary and benefits in a move by LAUSD to make it harder for targeted teachers to resist their firing. So what's different now?
Up until this cancellation of ‘teacher jail’ by Holmquist, how come some teachers were ‘incarcerated’ for as little as two hours, but other teachers spent a full 6 hours required at LAUSD offices doing nothing in complete isolation? Did any of this have to do with the inflammatory nature of images of teachers being shown by the media sitting around a room and getting paid to do absolutely nothing?
Is there any good faith belief on the part of any administrator at LAUSD that teachers confined to "rubber rooms" have really done something wrong or has this just been LAUSD's rather successful means of intimidating teachers to force them to resign or retire?
Superintendent John Deasy has said on many occasions that if the police find a teacher innocent of charges against them, they are put back to work immediately. This is a lie that mainstream media refuses to report.
Some teachers like Sigi Siegel have actually won their case at the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) and still remain incarcerated in their homes, while LAUSD lawyers stall her reinstatement by filing endless appeals- there is no shortage of money at LAUSD for doing this irrespective of the merit of any case, since in the aggregate, most teachers roll over and LAUSD saves about $60,000 for every teacher they are able to force into retirement or resignation.
In her case, she even won the first LAUSD appeal of her OAH victory in Superior Court, but LAUSD still keeps her isolated and under tremendous physical and emotional stress by now forcing her to stay at home from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., instead of at an LAUSD office. Is there any legal justification for doing this under a system of law that presumes Ms. Siegel innocent and where the only examination of the facts by neutral legal forums has found her completely innocent of all charges against her?
While she continues to be paid, doesn't Ms. Siegel also have a constitutionally protected property right to continue exercising her profession as a teacher without LAUSD a priori depriving her of this right without due process of law?
The simple answer as to why LAUSD General Counsel Holmquist has reversed his position on housing teachers without any justification is that these targeted teachers had finally started to become proactive and were using their time in ‘jail’ together to organize effective legal opposition to the witch hunt against them.
For too long, the mainstream media has given LAUSD a pass, when it comes to using any real journalistic standard for examining LAUSD's war on teachers at the top of the salary scale, about to vest in lifetime health benefits, or disabled, which account for well over 93% of all teachers incarcerated by LAUSD. They have never asked the hard questions.
If newly elected UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl wants to convince anybody that he is any different than do-nothing Warren Fletcher and his predecessors at UTLA, he needs to stop allowing UTLA to sit quietly by while its teacher members at the top salary and benefits from being systematically targeted and removed based on obviously fabricated charges by LAUSD.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 44
Pub: May 30, 2014
