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How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district choose t

How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district choose to pay him $40,000 to drop his appeal when he finally was fired? Because even a case where a teacher was found to be feeding semen to blindfolded students, the job protections were so strong that that the district knew it was the cheapest and easiest way out to just pay him off. I left California 3 years ago, so maybe this has changed, but at that time there were countless stories about "teacher jails" where Los Angeles would send teachers who should have been fired, but the process is so expensive and fraught with appeals and obstructions that it was cheaper and easier to keep them on the payroll - permanently. They would isolate them so they couldn't have contact with students, but they'd go on paying them to go sit in empty offices - for years. The argument that tenure only adds requirements for coaching sort of whitewashes over the practical challenges presented when a district needs to let a teacher go.

germinalphrase 8y ago
I have no idea about that story, and it’s directly contradictory to my experience teaching in several Midwest states.
- SaintGhurka 8y ago
  I assumed you were a CA teacher. It is truly a maddening situation there, and I have a feeling most of it is fairly unique to California. Teacher pay varies considerably between districts - some pay six figures while others top out at 65k. The pension benefits largely depend on pay, but usually it's something like 2% of salary for each year of service, which they can collect starting at 62.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district choose to pay him $40,000 to drop his appeal when he finally was fired? Because of management negligence (and worse) in dealing with, documenting, and preserving documentation of earlier incidents, including the district at one point systematically destroying records relating to sexual abuse at district schools. The problem was not the rules requiring documented cause for firing, the problem was management repeatedly covering for him and other abusers, including by destroying evidence. Management misconduct doesn't justify giving more arbitrary power to management. Though, of course, that's what management likes to argue for whenever its own misdeeds are at issue.
- SaintGhurka 8y ago
  But once it came out, once he was actually caught feeding semen to students, it was STILL hard to fire him. Sure, you can make a case that management failed to document his previous behavior so they had to start over from zero and document, counsel, coach, whatever the contract requires, but once he was actually busted for ejaculating in kids food - how is it reasonable that they couldn't fire him on the spot?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > But once it came out, once he was actually caught feeding semen to students He wasn't actually caught (or even formally accused of by the district in its dismissal charges) doing that. Everything that came out and was cited as the basis for his dismissal was the result of a photo lab reporting pictures, and in the charges for dismissal what is identified as being on the cookies is “an unidentified milky-white substance”. Notably, none of the reports of sexual abuse that students identified were made around the same time to school officials, or even the reported sexual context of the events in the photographs used as the basis for dismissal charges, were even referenced in those (exceedingly nonspecific) charges. The management failures continued into the suspension and firing process.

germinalphrase 8y ago

I have no idea about that story, and it’s directly contradictory to my experience teaching in several Midwest states.

SaintGhurka 8y ago
I assumed you were a CA teacher. It is truly a maddening situation there, and I have a feeling most of it is fairly unique to California. Teacher pay varies considerably between districts - some pay six figures while others top out at 65k. The pension benefits largely depend on pay, but usually it's something like 2% of salary for each year of service, which they can collect starting at 62.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district choose to pay him $40,000 to drop his appeal when he finally was fired? Because of management negligence (and worse) in dealing with, documenting, and preserving documentation of earlier incidents, including the district at one point systematically destroying records relating to sexual abuse at district schools. The problem was not the rules requiring documented cause for firing, the problem was management repeatedly covering for him and other abusers, including by destroying evidence. Management misconduct doesn't justify giving more arbitrary power to management. Though, of course, that's what management likes to argue for whenever its own misdeeds are at issue.

SaintGhurka 8y ago
But once it came out, once he was actually caught feeding semen to students, it was STILL hard to fire him. Sure, you can make a case that management failed to document his previous behavior so they had to start over from zero and document, counsel, coach, whatever the contract requires, but once he was actually busted for ejaculating in kids food - how is it reasonable that they couldn't fire him on the spot?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > But once it came out, once he was actually caught feeding semen to students He wasn't actually caught (or even formally accused of by the district in its dismissal charges) doing that. Everything that came out and was cited as the basis for his dismissal was the result of a photo lab reporting pictures, and in the charges for dismissal what is identified as being on the cookies is “an unidentified milky-white substance”. Notably, none of the reports of sexual abuse that students identified were made around the same time to school officials, or even the reported sexual context of the events in the photographs used as the basis for dismissal charges, were even referenced in those (exceedingly nonspecific) charges. The management failures continued into the suspension and firing process.