5th grade teacher made class write to a prisoner charged with child porn

[KurtNYC]

Officials at the Department of Education say they are looking to fire a Queens teacher who had her fifth-grade students send Christmas cards to a prison inmate who was previously been charged with possessing child pornography.

The city's special commissioner of investigation, Richard Condon, says Melissa Dean, 31, had her class in P.S. 143 at Corona, Queens send cards to John Coccarelli, who appears to have had a relationship with her.

The teacher did not ask permission from parents or the school and officials say many of the cards had the children's names and addresses on them.

"She told them they were going to homeless people, going to people in the service, that they were going to people who lived alone," said Condon. "I have no idea what this woman was thinking."

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/156064/queens-teacher-had-class-contact-inmate-who-previously-faced-child-porn-charges

She tricked the kids and is apparently in a "wifey" relationship with the imprisoned creep. Not fired or charged with a crime yet. Ugh.

[gordianot]

1. There always seems to be a few out there with a total lack of moral judgement.

When they are in a position requiring public trust it becomes painful when they betray that trust. It will take time for an appropriate response it would be fair to assume that some school administrator is not resting well at night.

[Nolimit]

2. I had to do something like this as a kid

When I was in 4th grade I remember writing to our teacher's friend, who was a real nice lady as I remember. I think it was meant as practice writing correspondence. This was a few years before the dawn of email of course. This woman's choice of recipient was extremely poor.

[Pisces]

3. Why is this person still on the job??She should be suspended at the very least. I would not allow my

child to go to her class. I would demand a switch or a new teacher.

[Recovered Repug]

10. The video at the link includes an interview with the school chancellor.

He stated that the were in the process of terminating the teacher. I guess that i's need to be dotted and t's crossed.

[msanthrope]

16. If you see my link below, she gets a very long and drawn out arbitration process..it could be years.

[Pisces]

18. The process should involve suspension. And how long could the process take. We know she made the

children write the letters, that she is a penal girlfriend to this prisoner, and that he is a child molester. What more do we need to know???? As a mother I need no more information.

[msanthrope]

21. The process could take years..read the link in post #13. nt

[msanthrope]

13. She's still in a job because of the nature of the contract between NYC and its teachers....

Here's an article that explains it all...

Annals of Education

The Rubber Room

The battle over New York City’s worst teachers.

by Steven Brill August 31, 2009 .


In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.

Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill#ixzz1mZHFaeI5

[Pisces]

20. This is completely unacceptable. I do not understand anyone defending this practice.

THese teachers need to be fired after a hearing of some sorts. They should not be paid for 3 years these insane rules
need to be changed.

Last week we had 3 teachers in California molesting children with the lollipop game, tasting game, and some bondage???
These teachers need to be fired, not put in some rubber room with pay.

[msanthrope]

24. There are plenty of DUers who have attacked Stephen Brill for writing such incovenient truths....

If you google 'democratic underground' 'brill' and 'ravitch' you will note some of the noise.

[leeroysphitz]

4. What could go wrong? n/t

[Honeycombe8]

22. Really. What WAS she thinking? nt

[hamsterjill]

5. I think she should be fired.

If the situation really is as indicated here, if I were the parent of one of those students, I would want her to be fired.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

6. parole hearing scheme?

"But look! Children adore my husband and don't feel threatened by him!"

[Snake Alchemist]

7. How can this person not be fired? Are we missing something? nt

[KurtNYC]

11. I think this just broke yesterday

she has been re-assigned, so she is out of the classroom now.

[Snake Alchemist]

12. Reassigned to what exactly? nt

[msanthrope]

14. A Rubber Room, probably. I hope she's nowhere near kids. See post #13 above. nt

[Snake Alchemist]

15. I hope it's LITERALLY a rubber room and not some room she can sit around and listen to her iPod and

get paid.

[msanthrope]

17. No--she will just sit around and collect her 75k salary. Seriously...read the link. She will also

accrue towards her pension, and all raises.....

[Snake Alchemist]

19. Depressing. nt

[Initech]

8. That's unbelievably creepy.

[WI_DEM]

9. I agree, she should be fired.

[NotThisTime]

23. My kid would be out of there so damn fast their heads would spin

[Pisces]

25. Where are the teachers on this board?? MadFloridian, KBilKansas and many others who said this rubber

room was a misrepresented lie?? This is crazy. Teachers should be protected but not at the cost of the children!!