The good news is the city's Education Department said that a majority of staffers removed to the city's infamous Rubber Rooms last June are out. The bad, or at least questionable news, is that a "majority" of those are back in the classrooms. Under an agreement between the city and the teachers' union, all 744 teachers in the rubber rooms had to have their cases resolved by the end of 2010. Now 38% of the teachers have been removed from the city's payroll, and the rest are teaching again.
Of the teachers back teaching, 83 have open criminal cases against them or are waiting on an arbitrator to rule on their disciplinary hearing. Another 59 of the 747 were fired, 121 resigned or quit in a settlement, and one died. A bill introduced by Senator John Flanagan regarding the "last in, first out" firing policy would have automatically fired any teacher convicted of a crime.
UFT president Michael Mulgrew told CityRoom that this is a good thing: “All the demonizing that went on with these teachers, all of the complaints that this could never be fixed were wrong. Once there was a will there was a way. Not only did this work, it worked better than we could have imagined. It’s fast and its fair, and that’s what we wanted." Did he not hear the part about open criminal cases?
