Following a barrage of exposés on the Department of Education's Rubber Room—a paid purgatory for union teachers booted from the classroom— Sen. Ruben Diaz of the Bronx slammed the system. "New York City must no longer permit a gift of several million dollars for incompetent former teachers who sit in the infamous 'rubber rooms,' drawing full salary while the Department of Education drags its feet and refuses to promptly address allegations of teacher misconduct and incompetence," said the Democrat in an angry statement to the Post.
Last week the Post profiled two Rubber Roomers, both barred from the classroom long ago for lewd and lascivious behavior towards their young students. For seven years Francisco Olivares—who touched, photographed and impregnated different girls at the school where he taught math—has been accepting a paycheck for work not completed (his salary is now $94,154/year). Another teacher, Alan Rosenfeld, has been making millions in a side business, while simultaneously collecting his growing Rubber Room salary. He was taken from the classroom almost a decade ago for staring at students' butts, and he smells bad too.
"What uniform service gets the benefit of 'suspended with pay' without any work responsibilities?" inquired Diaz, angrily, and the DOE was all too happy to respond. "The silver lining here is that Albany leaders are finally getting fed up with the rotten options that state law and labor rules give us for cases like this, and are starting to talk about the kind of changes we've long been pushing for," said spokesman David Cantor. Last week Mayor Bloomberg thanked the Post for bringing to light the absurd institution. In his recent budget, Gov. Paterson threatened to cut 11,000 city teaching jobs.
