Thomas Gibbons is a poster boy for why school arbitration must be stopped at once — a scum-sucking, violent pedophile who has no business in society.
But the New York City school system, and the teachers union that runs the joint, has declared the 59-year-old Bronx high school special-ed teacher perfectly suited to be around your kids and mine.
Disgusting!
I’ve written about Gibbons for more than a decade, since I learned that this man, who should be locked up with beefy mutants, was roaming freely in a city school — unpunished and unwatched.
Until he was caught, allegedly, doing it again.
Gibbons was arrested in his Westchester home yesterday, charged with having sexual contact with a female relative in New Jersey. The child was 9.
This is shocking. Brutal. And preventable.
Because back in 1995, Gibbons was arrested for grabbing a young woman by the hair inside William H. Taft HS in The Bronx, slamming her against a wall and holding a gun to her chest.
Gibbons was angry over the girl’s attempt to end a sexual relationship that began when she was 15.
That should have ended his career as both a teacher and a pervert. But rather than having Gibbons fired, the girl, a recent immigrant from India, “was tricked and manipulated [by Gibbons] into dropping the charges,’’ the school system’s then-legal counsel Lawrence Becker wrote.
The Gibbons case went into arbitration — the school system’s black hole, run by union-backed legal nitwits, that exists to clear the worst educators of heinous crimes.
This, after another former student told investigators that she was sexually touched by Gibbons nearly four years earlier. But when her mother complained to the principal, nothing was done.
Still, the school had a smoking gun! Gibbons was caught by investigators on a secretly recorded audio tape, begging his victim to protect him. He talked explicitly about their years having sex.
So was Gibbons fired?
Put to bed without porn?
No.
Arbitrator Margaret Leibowitz needed only a “preponderance’’ of evidence to fire Gibbons. But in a 1996 trial, she decided the evidence was “insufficient.’’
She did nothing.
And the brilliant then-Board of Education just moved Gibbons from Taft to John F. Kennedy HS. He remains there to this day.
When I called Gibbons in 2001, he got huffy.
“I’ve never been convicted of anything,” he said.
The horrific school arbitration system must end.
Anyone who wants to be hired as an arbitrator must be approved by both the school system and the teachers union — a conflict of interest, because arbitrators who rule against teachers risk never getting hired again.
Mayor Bloomberg backs a bill in Albany that would give Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott the sole right to fire teachers. An overdue move.
With pigs like Gibbons infesting schools, there’s no time to waste.