Posted on 1/6/2008, 3:09:13 AM by Libloather
Teacher Misconduct Cases in Florida
Last Updated: 6:44 PM Jan 3, 2008
Reporter: Chris Casquejo
Last school year, more than 4,000 teachers in Florida were investigated for misconduct, but just 300 disciplinary actions show up on a state website. The numbers do little to comfort parents.
“Anything that’s inappropriate with a child should be taken care of.
They should be barred by the school board where they should not be able to teach again,” says Shelley Gandy.
Key lawmakers say the days of quietly firing a bad teacher are over.
A Senate study on teacher misconduct found that some Florida school districts don’t even do background checks. It also found that districts don’t have to report whether a teacher has been fired for misconduct.
The Florida School Boards Association says changes long overdue.
“I think it’s obvious we need a better reporting system so that every district knows what’s going on,” says Wayne Blanton with the FSBA.
The state can take away a teacher’s license for just seven reasons, including immoral acts and serious criminal charges. Lawmakers say the standards are too vague to be meaningful. Look for them to force schools to tighten the standards. The Department of Education says it is already doing what it can.
“We’re going to look into those things. And within the confines of the current law and statutes, pursue those to the degree we can,” says Marian Lambeth with the Florida DOE.
More than 250,000 people hold teaching certificates in Florida.
Lawmakers will take up the issue of teacher misconduct next week. You can log on to www.myfloridateacher.com and click on “search disciplinary actions” to search by name or county for disciplinary reports.
Search Your Teacher, State Here
USA - A confidential, nationwide list of 24,500 teachers who have been punished for a wide array of offenses was made available to the public Friday by a Florida newspaper.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune created a searchable database of the teachers' names after waiting for years to gain access to the list. The paper began seeking the material as part of its earlier reporting on teacher sexual misconduct in Florida. It obtained the list from the Florida Department of Education.
The list, gathered and maintained by the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, does not provide any information on why any of the teachers were disciplined. Sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, criminal convictions and other misbehavior all can bring disciplinary actions against teacher licenses.
A nationwide Associated Press investigation earlier this year sought five years of state disciplinary actions against teachers and the reasons behind them. In the years the AP studied, 2001 to 2005, roughly one-quarter of all disciplinary actions against teachers involved sexual misconduct.
The AP's seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned following allegations of sexual misconduct.
The association's list is the only nationwide effort by school systems to track teachers who get into trouble, but the association does not make the information available to the public. The group is a voluntary, nonprofit organization of state education agencies.
The database is made available to other state education agencies to provide a warning to states about teachers with past problems. NASDTEC has no ability to force education officials to list all the teachers who have gotten in trouble in their states. The list also does not provide details on what teachers got in trouble for, and leaves it to states or hiring school districts to dig for more information.
Roy Einreinhofer, NASDTEC's executive director, said the agreement with states that allows for the collection of the names of disciplined teachers is based on a promise that the list will be kept confidential. He opposed the newspaper's decision to publish the names.
"We've heard from some states that this violates their state law," he said. "It could very well cause the end of it. That's why we're so vitally concerned about it."
The list made available to the newspaper was incomplete, Einreinhofer said. The complete database includes roughly 37,000 names. About 4,000 Florida teachers were not included because of the way the state agency saves the data, the newspaper said. Einreinhofer said he couldn't explain why the other 8,500 were missing.
The list goes back 20 years and states could have included disciplinary actions dating farther back.
Robert Shoop, a Kansas State University professor who has studied teacher sexual misconduct and has called for tougher oversight and more openness by administrators, said a current list of problem teachers should be gathered by each state and made public to better protect students.
"Clearly the public does have a right to know and they should have access," he said.
The newspaper's Web site allows readers to type in a name and state to determine whether a person is in the database. The list provides no other information than a date of birth to confirm an identity.
http://www.woio.com/global/story.asp?s=7530705
fl/hs ping
We need pictures to determine guilt or innocence, your honor.
can we use search limiters like “hot and female” ?
Well, we could just send all the teachers to jail, along with the parents. The kids could go to juvenile detention centers.
I expect we wouldn’t hear any more tiresome complaints for a while.
Like the FReeper who knows of a situation where a 7th grade girl was caught planting her panties in her teacher’s car in retaliation for a low grade she got?
You will likely note that the majority of teachers who insist on running a disciplined classroom are the ones who have the greatest nuumber of misconduct complaints.
The Liberal Socialist culture is winning the cultural battle. No wonder so many parents want to home school their children, or insist on vocher style selection of private schools that support student disciplinary procedures.
Among those thousands of complaints against teachers there are truly legitimate grounds for complaint.
The fact is though, that most of them involve teachers who have required that their employers support teacher disciplinary procedures in their classes, and have failed to obtain that support.
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But,,,come Monday their little ones will be back in their government school indoctrination center.
Free babysitting, paid by neighbors, is a powerful opiate of the middle class masses.
In California they lifted the statute of limitations for the Catholic Church allowing lawyers to find cases from the 1930’s but exempted the public schools. Let’s open the books for all institutions and force the guilty to pay $1.4M for each victim like the Church has had to do.
I’m really taking stories like this with a grain of salt. I know people who were falsely accused for child molestation, my brother being one. My ex-s-i-l admitted later to me that she just made it up to keep him away from her and her daughter.
Fortunately, this was the day before all this sex offender registration so he’s not branded and has to register everywhere he moves.
The abuse of this kind of thing does a grave disservice to both those falsely accused and those who are really abused. In one case, it ruins someone for life; in the other, with the hysteria over every accusation, it casts doubt on those who really were abused.
Personally, I wouldn’t want my child sitting next to or socializing with another child who would make a false accusation.
From my experience, Florida public schools produce dumb students but good football players. There is a good reason why all of my friends down there have their kids in private schools.
Students spend time and energy finding a button to push. The teachers who refuse manipulation and stay impersonal and professional are the very teachers who, because of their discipline, have complaints against them.
Of course you are quite right in not wanting your children to be in such an environment. These manipulation techniques are quite transmittable among teenagers.
It all begins by students asking for a teacher's, "personal opinion," for example.
Teaching is a thankless profession these days. Only the mediocre survive. And they also are the poorest teachers.
Kids lie. We lived next door to kids who did that, and we went to church with kids who did that.
If you’re going to keep them away from others who will do such things, you might as well have one and live on a desert island.
Other kids misbehavior where ever I’ve seen it, including church, is a great opportunity for instruction and discussion about why it’s wrong. It’s good because they’re not involved and can stand back from the situation and see it objectively.
I recommend post #16.
One good thing about homeschooling was I was around to keep an eye on things, and I did have veto control over my kids’ friends.
In government school it is the government who decides with whom a child will or will not associate. ( In spite of our First Amendment Right to free assembly)
Yeah. My daughter has no choice whatsoever in who her friends will be. She just gets a letter from the DOE signed by George Bush saying "Lisa, Chloe and Beth will be your friends this year. Thank you."
Do you even read what you write?
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