It’s OK to say “schmeckel” in sex ed class.
A Brooklyn federal judge said that a Staten Island teacher of 26 years acted correctly when she allowed students to use words like “furburger” and “schmeckle” and “blow job” to teach her sex ed/HIV/AIDS class in public school and is allowing her to sue the Education Department for suspending her.
“If the Board of Education wants its teachers to instruct adolescents about HIV using Latinism of the academy, excluding vulgarism of the street, it should tell them so, plainly,” wrote Judge Jack Weinstein in his decision, released today.
The 26-year tenured teacher, Faith Kramer, 48, sued the Education Department last year for $1 million after she was suspended from IS 72 and placed in a “rubber room” for five months after parents, who saw the notes from their children’s class, complained to officials.
The guidelines for teaching sex ed in the city’s public schools do not prohibit a teacher from using vulgarities to teach the class.
“The regulation relied upon by the Board did not prohibit Ms. Kramer’s conduct,” Weinstein wrote. “It appears to have been selected post hoc, long after her suspension, to justify the measures that had been taken in response to parents’ complaints.”
“The words used are a frequent part of our language and the language of school children,” said Duane Felton, her lawyer.
The day after the class, Kramer, a gym and health teacher, was tossed in an Education Dept. rubber room, where teachers under investigation report while they are suspended from classroom work, for “verbal abuse” for four months beginning in February 2008. She hass since been reinstated and is now back to teaching the class.
But Kramer, a single mother of two, still cannot pick up extra assignments, like grading standardized tests or monitoring after school activities, which come with supplemental pay, her lawyer said.
Weinstein, 89, who worked on the NAACP’s litigation team on the landmark Brown v Board of Education case, even said in his findings that Kramer’s job might be harder than his.
“To a senior judge, father and grandfather, educated in the New York City public schools, there appears to be no more daunting undertaking than discussing sex and HIV/AIDS with a class of female and male thirteen- and fourteen-year-old eight grade students,” Weinstein wrote. “Executing such a task would require great sensitivity, skill, commitment, and not a little courage.”
The judge did dismiss one of Kramer’s claims, that the Board had violated her First Amendment rights.