A charter school advocate wants to close a loophole that allows predatory teachers fired by the city Department of Education to land jobs at charter and private schools.
James Merriman, CEO of the nonprofit New York City Charter School Center, said his organization contacted the DOE to talk about “this critical issue” following the Post’s coverage of a fired French teacher who had found work at a charter school in the Bronx.
Dulaina Almonte, 33, was fired for sending 28,000 text messages to a student at Truman HS in the Bronx, but landed a teaching job at AECI 2: NYC Charter High School for Engineering and Innovation, a school private.
She was fired by the charter school last week after the Post published a front-page story exposing her past alleged misconduct and her defiant response: “You really can’t touch me. »
The charter school’s CEO suggested administrators were unaware of the teacher’s past when they hired her.
This is a “student safety issue: Charter schools deserve to at least have access to information about teachers on the ‘do not hire’ list,” Merriman said. “We have contacted the DOE and they have indicated their willingness to restart discussions on this critical issue. They fully understand the issues and the need to prioritize student safety, and I am confident that we can quickly achieve this.
But DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer insisted that DOE does not maintain a “do not hire” list or voluntarily share information with charter schools. But, he added, the agency “assigns a problem code to employees who are terminated for a variety of reasons.”
The agency responds to “all requests from other schools when they conduct a background check.” But without a signed waiver from the fired teacher, he added, “legally we can only provide the title, date of employment and general responsibilities.”
A teacher’s misconduct will not show up in a fingerprint analysis unless their behavior results in an arrest. And that’s the excuse AECI 2 CEO Derick Spaulding used when asked how the school could have hired Almonte.
“All employees must be fingerprinted,” he said. “If there was something in a person’s past that deserved” not to hire them, “it would show up” there. This is the state’s way of declaring that this person is authorized to work” with children.
The Charter School Center has previously requested more information sharing from the DOE, without success.
“We contacted the DOE specifically on this issue during the de Blasio administration, but we were unable to resolve the legal and privacy issues,” Merriman said.
Styer said he couldn’t speak about what happened under a previous administration.
New York Post
