The Department of Education can’t fire a teacher who insulted students and immigrants on Facebook, joked about guns in school and walked the halls with a baseball bat, The Post has learned.
“What bad can happen when young people invest in high-powered firearms? Nothing. .. nothing at all,” Patricia Dawson, a highly-regarded English teacher at downtown’s HS of Economics and Finance, cracked on Facebook.
Dawson is one of a cadre of city teachers who have landed in hot water for venting about their students on Facebook, or posting dumb jokes .But a forgiving arbitrator said the Department of Education can’t fire her.
In her January 2011 rant — open to at least seven students among her Facebook friends — Dawson called one of her 11th-grade classes “suicide-inducing.”
She named one student as the “WORST be (sic) he’s unteachable and the weirdest human being EVER!”
She added that she dreaded class presentations by two other students, also naming them: “I will be quietly imploring anyone to end my life. . . and no one will be there to supply a gun.”
She went on, “I consider all immigrants as potential gun carriers, and I still think you have a gun. .. most people at HSEF carry a gun,… I use a gun to board the elevator in lieu of a swipe card. Try it…it works.”
The school’s PTA president, a Facebook friend, reported the remarks.
The DOE tried to terminate the tenured Dawson, also alleging insubordination after she walked around school with a colleague’s baseball bat and didn’t turn it over to Principal Michael Stanzione until he asked several times.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hit you with it,’’ Stanzione testified she told him.
Dawson denied that comment, but admitted she later went into his office to ask for the bat back. He wasn’t there, so she just took it.
In her hearing, Dawson admitted her Facebook remarks were wrong, but insisted she made them “in a joking and sarcastic manner.” She also said she “used humor as one of her methods of teaching,”
Joshua Javits, the arbitrator who presided at her administrative trial, said Dawson “horribly abused her position of trust” and called her comments about students “cruel and demeaning.”
But he found her a “dedicated teacher” and “not irredeemable.”
He imposed a $15,000 fine and required that she take a course on “appropriate boundaries and relationships between teachers and students.”
But while the ruling was issued last June, the DOE has not yet returned Dawson to the classroom, though she remains on the payroll. Dawson, who made $72, 265 in 2011, has taken down her Facebook page. She could not be reached for comment, and her union lawyer, Christopher Callagy, did not return calls.