Alice – Victoria!
C. M. Rubin explores the Victorian Extravaganza in Llandudno, Wales, and the fascinating history... Read More
A disgraced teacher worth almost $10m is refusing to retire his $100k a year salary — despite not doing anything to earn it.
After a scandal saw Alan Rosenfeld, 66, declared a danger to kids, the typing teacher hasn’t been allowed to set foot in a classroom for more than a decade. This hasn’t stopped the man, who also has a $10 million real estate portfolio, from collecting his $100,049 a year city salary.
Including health benefits, a growing pension, vacation and sick pay, Rosenfeld and six other disgraced teachers cost the taxpayer more than $650,000 a year in total salaries. And while Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo call for better teacher evaluations, under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, the Department of Ed says they can’t be fired, writes Susan Edelman at the New York Post.
Rosenfeld was suspended for a week back in 2001 after being accused of making lewd comments and ogling at eighth-grade girls at IS 347 in Queens. However, as the Department of Education failed to produce enough witnesses at a hearing, the Department chose to keep him in a “rubber room” instead of firing him.
T “rubber room” is the infamous place where the Department of Education has put teachers who are under misconduct charges. While there, Rosenfeld kept busy managing his many investment properties and working on his law practice, writes Edelman.
The Department of Education closed rubber rooms in the summer of 2010, and since then Rosenfeld and six others report to the Division of School Facilities, which maintains DOE buildings, in a warehouse in Long Island City.
Four years ago Rosenfeld turned 62 and could have resigned. He chose not to and his pension grows by $1,700 for each year he stays.
It has been estimated that if he were to quit right now, his annual pension would total an estimated $85,400.
Marcus Winters, a Manhattan Institute expert on teacher evaluation, said:
“It’s a tremendous waste of money.
“While we don’t want to remove people just because they’ve been accused, we also want the school system to cut ties with teachers it’s not going to put in the classroom.”
But Winters added, “If these people are actually dangerous, it’s better to waste the money than to put them back with kids.”
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Comments
One my math teachers from high school ended up in the rubber room for distributing cocaine, although not, if I recall correctly, to his students.
If this example doesn’t lead to some soul-searching by the NYC teachers union, I just don’t know what will. Tenure protection rum amok! He should have been fired and stripped of his pensions, not allowed to get fat and happy and loaded on the city’s dime.
First, was he or not guilty. If he was then he should have been fired; if not then why wasn’t he returned to the class room.