Letters to the LA Times | http://lat.ms/Jb7ryW
Re "Displaced Miramonte staff share hurt, anger," May 4
As a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District adult division, I can accept having classes interrupted twice this year for a child-abuse awareness workshop. What I fail to grasp is the necessity of removing dozens of innocent teachers from their classrooms at Miramonte Elementary School and isolating them at another site.
The warped logic of Supt. John Deasy purports to show that the district is concerned about the safety of its children. But all it does is criminalize educators who shared the same hallways, lunchroom and parking lot with the alleged perpetrator.
Aren't there enough victims already?
Linda Mothner
Culver City
Once again, professional educators are the victims/heroes. All of them are mandated reporters, yet none of them saw a need to protect children. Now they're part of professional education's standard solutions to such interruptions to their perpetual underperforming outcomes — and find themselves being "moved" as a solution.
These teachers are not the first group of "suffering professionals" to be perceived as harboring child predators. They will not lose their jobs.
Their removal from Miramonte is just temporary and meant to convey the "toughness" that their leaders must show to maintain their own employment and the status quo. It seems that their real hurt is that they are being treated the way parents and families are normally treated in the educational arena.
It might relieve their suffering if they understood that this is business as usual.
Kalem Aquil
Long Beach
Kalem-
ReplyDeleteYour comment implies that all other teachers at Miramonte School knew what Berndt had done, and did not report it.
If that is indeed true, then those teachers (or any of the school staff so involved) should be punished, as they are, as you say, mandated reporters, and no one should keep quiet if they know about such horrible crimes to children.
Yet, I recall seeing no such evidence, that all other school staff knew what Berndt was doing, and failed to report. (I am sure that Berndt did not talk about his sick antics in the staff lunchroom.)
If a couple teachers did know about it and did not report it, they should certainly be punished, IMO. (And not just transferred to other schools--but even face criminal charges--if it is proven that they knew.) But why transfer a whole school staff?
The people who were the most punished by the wholesale transfer of the school staff were not the teachers, but the children. I heard there were many excellent teachers at the school, and the current principal was very good. The children had already suffered a lot from the Miramonte scandal. It must have been a second trauma for them to have their whole school staff transferred, the teacher who knows them and has been teaching them all year suddenly gone, all unfamiliar faces, etc.
It is another example of a dumb act by John Deasy--to look like he is doing something about a situation, while actually making a situation worse.
I am also still wondering what happened to the following person. In reading about Miramonte, I recall that there were allegations about Berndt made to the principal there (one who has not been at that school for many years now) a long time ago--10 to twenty years ago, I forget when. That principal pooh-poohed the charges--said that the kids must be imagining things, did not investigate at all, etc. That principal was not named in the accounts. If that principal is still in the district, he or she should be fired, as that negligence allowed Berndt to harm many more students. But one never hears about any action against that unnamed principal. There should be--perhaps legal and/or civil charges as well.