Nice to know these are the assholes who are looking out for our kids.... Turns out it costs the taxpayers of Los Angeles 40,000 dollars to get rid of a teacher who was spoon feeding his semen to blind folded students while he took pictures of it..... This kind of shit just makes me want to go postal The teachers union is the most disgusting group of people in America today, and by far the most damaging to the countries future. They are real good at defending ass holes like this, but when asked for the slightest accountability about the piss poor job they are doing of teaching the kids, they turn around and say that they are all about the children, and that whoever is attackingh them is attacking their children, while they defend their pay raises and tenure, and force layoffs to other teachers..... The Los Angeles Unified School District paid Mark Berndt, the teacher at the center of the Miramonte Elementary child abuse scandal, $40,000 to drop the challenge to his dismissal last year. The payout consisted of four months of back salary plus reimbursement for the cost of health benefits. Berndt was fired by the Board of Education in February 2011 after officials learned that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was investigating him for alleged lewd acts against students. He was arrested last week. The firing took Berndt off the district payroll. But he fought to keep his job through an appeal process that lasted until he settled with the school system and resigned in June. The settlement with Berndt came in the face of a dilemma, said L.A. Unified general counsel David Holmquist. A hearing on the dismissal was pending and the district didn't have evidence to justify the firing because the Sheriff's Department investigation was ongoing. "We were told we could not do any investigation" to avoid interfering with a law enforcement probe, said Holmquist. "We didn't have any evidence, and we couldn't put on any witnesses. We didn't have anything to successfully defend a challenge." Berndt was charged last week with 23 counts of lewd conduct against children; another teacher, Martin Springer, was charged this week with three counts of lewd conduct. Berndt is alleged to have taken photographs of blindfolded children being spoon-fed his semen. Springer is accused of fondling a girl in his class. The Berndt and Springer cases are believed to be unrelated. At the school Thursday, tensions flared openly for the first time between the teachers union and L.A. Unified over the handling of the crisis. United Teachers Los Angeles criticized the district's wholesale removal of the Miramonte faculty. The campus, in unincorporated Florence-Firestone south of downtown L.A., had been closed Tuesday and Wednesday to allow for the transition. "When teachers were told that they were being transferred, dozens of teachers were in tears," union President Warren Fletcher said. "They are part of the fabric of this community." The union accepted the transfers, Fletcher said, on the understanding that the move was temporary and that no innocent teacher's employment record would be marred. L.A. Unified, he said, broke both promises, by categorizing the teachers' relocation as an administrative transfer. Such paperwork frequently results from a disciplinary action. The 85 affected instructors began filing grievances at union headquarters, Fletcher said. L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy contested the union's assertions. "When the investigations are complete and nothing emerges with a particular teacher, that teacher's assignment is to be Miramonte Elementary School," Deasy said in statement. Multiple inquiries are ongoing. Meanwhile, sources close to the investigation say the Sheriff's Department is conducting inquiries into a child-abuse allegation against a male teacher who once worked at Miramonte. The incident occurred in the 1980s and was the subject of a law enforcement investigation at the time, according to records that have surfaced at L.A. Unified. The allegation is too old to result in charges, sources said, but officials still want to learn as much as possible about what happened. In the interim, the teacher, who is working at another school, has been removed from his classroom. The union and Deasy have issued statements saying that their paramount interest is providing a stable and secure environment for Miramonte students. That premise was sorely tested Thursday morning with the deluge of news media, the phalanx of armed school police officers and more than 200 parents and students protesting the staff's replacement. With standardized testing and parent-teacher conferences coming up, the timing could not have been worse, said Betty Fuentes, 18, whose brother is a fifth-grader. First-grade teacher Martha Cedeno learned from her predecessor in the last couple of days about which children needed extra support and who seemed to be gifted â and also about two boys who usually needed to be separated. Cedeno led her new students through writing a farewell letter or drawing a picture for their former teacher. Only one student alluded to the teacher arrests. "You had to go because of somebody evil," said counselor Gina Adelman paraphrasing what the student wrote. The district assigned 45 counselors, one per classroom, to the school, where they are expected to remain until year's end. At one point, Cedeno needed the students' help. They directed her to the physical education schedule. "Volleyball 71," she read. Then she paused: "What does 71 mean? Boys and girls, do you know? Is that the area you play?" Some parents, including some who had observed classes, were reassured about their children's education after a meeting with new Principal Dolores Palacio. A retired administrator who has trained principals, Palacio had left a message offering help to then-Principal Martin Sandoval. She received a return call asking her to run Miramonte. "I really want to help the school get back into a semblance of normalcy," she said. "We know what we are here for. We know it's about the children and the parents." http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-miramonte-20120210,0,91877.story
I often imagine how I would handle situations like this, if I were a parent. If somebody fed my blindfolded 6 year old daughter (or son), their semen? Murder, rings a bell.
According to the California Department of Education the average per pupil expense for the 07-08 school year was $8,594. This puts California just below the national average of around $9,000 per student, and well below states like New York and New Jersey who average around $12,000 per student. (These figures do not include capital expenditure costs). As for other countries who are rated higher educationally than the United States: ⢠Korea (ranked 1st in scientific literacy and 2nd in mathematic literacy): spends around $4500 per student for primary education and $6500 per student for secondary education. ⢠Japan (1st in mathematical literacy and 2nd in scientific literacy): spends around $6700 per student for primary education and around $8000 per student for secondary education. ⢠Finland (1st in reading literacy and 3rd in scientific literacy): around $5500 per student for primary education and around $7000 per student for secondary education. ⢠New Zealand (3rd in reading literacy and 3rd in mathematical literacy) around $5000 per student for primary education and around $6000 per student for secondary education. In 2007, the United States ranked 15th in reading literacy, 24th in mathematics, and 21st in scientific literacy. **all data collected from OECD/PISA, chapter B, indicator B1 (source 1)
100 years ago, America lead the world. Now, thanks to Socialism and Progressive-ism, half of the population thinks they are "entitled to an upper-middle-class-lifesstyle because they woke up and found themselves on 3rd base"... aka, Born In America. This is what you get when most people park their asses in front of the TV... engrossed in Oprah, The Bachelor, and Dancing With The Stars... and the DemoCraps give them ever-increasing checks to continue doing the same in exchange for their vote. Disgusting!
They may be unionized, but I don't know how much power they have in those other countries. In California, the unions make it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher, so the number of them keeps growing. The procedure to fire a teacher in Cailfornia takes about five years and costs over $1 million dollars. School districts have given up on trying to get rid of bad teachers because it's too expensive. As a parent of two kids who are now in a private school, I would say that the unions are only a part of the problem. The other major problem is the parents. Bad parents make for bad students. Combine that with a lot of mediocre teachers and you've got a recipe for failure. In fairness to the teachers, there are a number of good ones out there, but it's an uphill battle for them, too.
I agree, in spite of this horrible, disgusting story, most teachers are dedicated to helping students, IMO. And, yes, for 'gawd's sake' or even God's sake, parents have to be more involved, public or private school, help your kids. Teachers will often fight the Unions, although a bit like fighting city hall. They don't want to follow all the mandates either. Many of them want to teach for 40 or 50 hours, not spend time supporting either bureaucracy, unions or the school districts. Very little gets me upset, even on ET, but when parents don't push as hard as they can to help their children succeed, it pushes my limits. Kids will test you, scream at you, make you crazy sometimes, but we, as parents and grand parents, have to fight back with calmness and always lead by example. You guys can call all the 'kumbaya' stuff you want this time, but our kids are the single most important thing in our lives. c
A parent might want to murder the perp but kids would live with the thought that they caused someone's death and that would be bad. Kids blame themselves often times for events beyond their control. So that would not be a good idea. Kids will also blame someone other than the the perp but the person who was supposed to protect them. A bad thing happened to me, how come my principal, or parent or the police didn't protect me? The child has loss faith in adults. The world isn't a safe place. Bad things happen. Then one suggest to murder the perp, the world is now even a more scarier place to a child..