Thomas Breen Photo
Paras’ prez Wilkins-Chambers: “Never seen anything like this.”
A student kicked his teacher in the leg, then claimed she kicked him back. Administrators didn’t find any marks on the boy from what seemed to be “minor physical contact,” a union official said, but Central Office decided to send the teacher out on administrative leave while an investigation is underway.
That teacher joins 69 school employees who were placed on administrative leave last year — at a cost of at least $410,000 (without including substitute teacher pay), according to newly obtained records.
Those figures were revealed in a 10-page report that the school district kept secret for six months, until the Independent filed an appeal to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.
In total, the district temporarily removed three administrators, 42 certified teachers, 15 paraprofessionals, seven security guards, and two youth workers from their jobs last school year.
“I’ve never seen that many before in my career in the district,” said Claudine Wilkins-Chambers, an aide at Conte-West Hills Magnet School who’s been a leader in the paraprofessionals union for the last 18 years. “I’m angry about it. It was really outrageous and out of control.”
Hill Regional Career Interdistrict Magnet High School, Augusta Lewis Troup School, Barnard Environmental Studies Interdistrict Magnet School, along with New Haven’s Head Start program, sent home the largest number of employees last school year, at least five each.
(The head of the School Administrators Association, Sequella Coleman, did not respond to a phone call for this story.)
Some teachers were out for months before they returned to work. On average, they missed 19.5 days of class, which is just over one-tenth of the 180-day school year.
A spokesperson for the school district did not respond to repeated questions about its use of administrative leave last year.
Asked in person, Michael Pinto, the district’s chief operating officer, said he needed to look up the details. A week later, after four follow-up emails, Pinto still hadn’t given any answers.
Iline Tracey, the district’s new superintendent after Carol Birks took a buy-out, said the district’s policy will change, now that she’s in charge.
“In all my lifetime in New Haven, I’ve never heard of so many people on leave,” Tracey said. “If there are things that someone has done in an egregious manner that is jeopardizing the safety of a child, you have to act on that. But if DCF did not take the case — and we do our own investigation and find it’s not — we should not be pursuing the individual.”
“So far,” Tracey added, after a month in charge, “I have not put anyone on leave.”
New Haven likely sent so many school employees home over what state officials say is a “very common misconception” of the role of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, even among school employees.
While the agency can usually take up to roughly 45 days to complete its investigation into abuse or neglect, DCF staff say the school district does not need to wait on its findings.
But in New Haven, with a short-staffed human resources department, the backlog has piled up, keeping some teachers out of the classroom for as long as 80 instructional days.
Union Prez: “Ridiculous”
Christopher Peak Photo
Dave Cicarella: Administrative leave policy is “ridiculous.”
“New Haven is absolutely ridiculous in the way they implement administrative leave. It could be the most trivial thing, and they will put the teacher out on leave,” said David Cicarella, the teacher union president. “I try not not criticize, but from one superintendent to the next, it has just been downright silly. Nobody does it like this except us”
Cicarella said he’d prefer for administrators to collect witness statements within a day, then conduct a preliminary threat assessment: What caused the problem? Does the teacher have a record of misconduct? Is there an ongoing risk to students? He estimated at least half the cases didn’t rise to that threat level.
He said teachers could still be investigated and reprimanded if they violated the district’s policies, but they didn’t always need to be out of the building while that personnel decision was being made.
He cited the example of the student who kicked the teacher.
“Even if it happened exactly as the student said, why would you send the teacher home for that?” Cicarella asked. “Nobody’s at risk here. If the kid picked up a chair and threw it, that’s a serious situation. If the teacher grabbed the kid and dragged him out of the room, you’d remove that teacher. But in this one, how are those kids really at risk?”
Cicarella added that he understands where administrators were coming from, as they needed to cover themselves. He said it makes sense to err on the side of caution, but he asked them to be “more judicious.”
“I think probably the most frustrating part is that I know every one of those guys in Central Office is well-intentioned. I know they’re looking out for our kids’ well-being, but now it’s to the detriment of their instruction,” he said. “It simply isn’t warranted, when we already have a lot of challenges to meet our learning goals.”
The number of teachers on leave showed the fall-out from then-Superintendent Birks’s insistence on reporting anything that could be construed as “abuse” or “neglect” to DCF, which state officials say fits with a trend of over-reporting across Connecticut’s school districts.
At her previous job within Hartford Public Schools, Birks saw a high-level administrator arrested for sending lewd texts to a 13-year-old girl, after years of similar complaints.
The Office of the Child Advocate then said it had “profound and urgent concerns” about Hartford Public Schools’s “lack of compliance” with state laws, like reporting child abuse and documenting student injuries, and a “lack of accountability and monitoring” for repeat offenders.
In Hartford Birks was put in charge of drafting changes to the district’s policies on child abuse and neglect, briefing school leaders and compiling data for a “child safety dashboard.”
What’s Going On?
Christopher Peak Photo
Former Superintendent Carol Birks: Didn’t want another DCF trip-up.
Meanwhile, across the rest of the state, DCF’s hotline was ringing nonstop, with more than one-third of all calls now coming from school employees, according to statistics the agency provided.
In 2017, school employees made 11,961 reports of suspected abuse or neglect.
This year, they’ve already outpaced that, making 18,288 calls, as of Oct. 1.
“In some very isolated incidents,” employees like Suffield’s retiring school superintendent “were arrested for failure to report,” said Ken Mysogland, the bureau chief of external affairs for DCF. “That has caused concern within the mandated reporter community, which then has resulted in reports coming to us that typically would not have been made. They are being made out of fear versus a true belief that a child has been harmed.”
However, “we can’t say this enough: We will always encourage individuals to contact our department if they have a reasonable suspicion abuse occurred, whether in a relative’s home, school, or daycare,” Mysogland added. “We don’t want people to hesitate if they truly believe a child has been harmed.”
Mysogland said that school employees need to use their professional “judgment and training” and “inherent knowledge of behavior” to decide when to file a report. He said there’s “context” and “intent” to think about. “There isn’t a list,” he said.
But he added if there are bruises and cuts, the agency definitely needs to hear about it.
“Is it appropriate for a teacher to hit a 3 1/2‑year-old special-needs child in the head in angry because they did not follow the rules?” Mysogland asked. “One would argue that should be looked into.”
“If an individual is upset at the terse way a teacher spoke with a student during a negative interaction in the classroom, in the absence of a physical altercation,” he added, “that tends to be addressed within the school.”
But regardless of how many calls come in and how credible they might be, DCF cautioned that school officials need to make their own personnel decisions.
Mysogland said that, while their investigation might find an employee didn’t abuse or neglect a child, that doesn’t mean the employee followed all the internal district policies.
“The perception is that these are the department’s decisions, but they’re not,” Mysogland said. “It is up to the individual school district and school administration in regards to how they respond to an allegation that their employee has abused or neglected a child. It is their decision on when they bring that employee back to their previous capacity. It is not up to the Department of Children and Families.”
“If You Don’t See Something …”
Some teachers complained that, after Birks arrived in New Haven, she took the rules way too far, and DCF’s investigations became an excuse to put school employees out.
“We were overdoing it,” said Tom Burns, the teacher’s union former vice-president, who worked on many cases. “They usually say, ‘If you see something, say something,’ but this was, ‘If you don’t see something, say something.’”
Cicarella said he wasn’t sure there had been an increase in the number of teachers being sent home on administrative leave. He said some teachers had previously tossed out inaccurate numbers at Board of Education meetings.
“The numbers may be different, but the policy has been the same,” Cicarella said. “Every superintendent we’ve had, for 13 years [he’s been union president], the marching order is to send the teacher home.”