What does it take to get a public-school teacher in New York City fired? Sex in a classroom? Guess again.
Cindy Mauro and Alini Brito were teachers at Brooklyn’s James Madison High in 2009 when they were caught, one topless, in the midst of a sexual romp in an empty classroom. They were fired, but of course they then sued. Now a panel of judges has ruled they can have their jobs back.
The “penalty of termination of employment,” these Solomons declared, “is shockingly disproportionate to petitioner’s misconduct.”
Shockingly disproportionate? Really?
How many folks in the private sector would keep their jobs if their boss discovered them using the company’s office spaces for a sexual hookup?
The court said the teachers “demonstrated a lapse in judgment.”
This being New York, however, the far more astounding lapse here is the decision handed down by the panel. In case you are wondering who could come up with such a cockamamie ruling, the answer is as follows: the Appellate Division’s Angela Mazzarelli, Richard Andrias, Leland DeGrasse, Helen Freedman and Judith Gische.
The reasoning was even more absurd: The judges said the city should have gone easy on Mauro and Brito because it had not fired other teachers who had engaged in inappropriate behavior with students (as opposed to two consenting adults). And the kicker: It was all consensual.
The judges have it backward. The question isn’t why these two teachers were given the boot when a janitor caught them using a classroom as a bedroom. It’s why all the other teachers weren’t fired, too.