"I am going to war on teacher's tenure," says Melissa Barton, "and I will win. I'm going to eliminate it this year. By this time next year, tenure won't be a word in the teacher union's vocabulary."
Yep, Barton is pissed. In 2008, her 5-year-old son, Alex, was voted out of his kindergarten class, Survivor-style, for misbehaving.
Before the boy was sent to the office, his classmates were each given a chance to explain why they didn't like him. That the boy's misbehavior was due to autism didn't factor into the judgments of the teacher,
Wendy Portillo -- who, after Alex's parents complained, was suspended
from teaching for a year. (She received full pay during her absence.)
Two
years later, life has returned to normalish for all involved. Alex is
an 8-year-old honor student who only suffers a little from the PTSD
with which he was diagnosed after being voted out of his own class.
Portillo is teaching again, allegedly abusing
a whole new class of differently abled kids. The U.S. Department of
Education Office for Civil Rights says Portillo and two other teachers
discriminated against a girl with a hearing impairment.
And Barton says she's close to settling with the St. Lucie County
School Board, which she has sued. Pending the approval of Alex's guardian ad litem,
the Bartons are set to receive $350,000 -- most of which will be set
aside for their children's future. Then, with the litigation over,
Barton will use her new free time to punish teachers like Portillo,
mercilessly.
"Wendy Portillo's attorney admitted that the district paid her legal
fees," says Barton, reached over the phone as she wrangled all three of
her kids (aged 1, 8, and 12) into her car after school. "That's $200,000 in legal fees. So here's your
punishment for the systematic abuse of children, Wendy Portillo: a year
of paid leave, and we pay your legal
fees."
After returning to the classroom in Port St. Lucie Portillo
once again became a figure of controversy for abusing a little
girl with a
hearing disability, according to the Department of Education findings. Portillo and two other teachers refused
to use a microphone so that their voices could be amplified by
the girl's hearing aid. Rather than use the microphone, Portillo and the
other teachers would scream at the girl to "pay attention" and even
make fun of her deafness -- with the microphone off.
"Why does this happen?" asks Barton. "How could a teacher -- a teacher on probation after violating the rights of a little boy -- behave in this way and not lose her job? It's the union. And it's tenure."
To back up her claim, Barton rattles off a long chain of abuses she
claims have been suffered by children across the country at the hands of
unaccountable teachers. Perhaps the most shocking incident involved a
300-pound Texan teacher who sat on an autistic child until he died.
Though the incident was ruled a homicide, the man, who has since moved to
Virginia, still teaches.
"The kid was a foster child his whole life," Barton says. "Eventually he
found a good mom -- that was the mom he had when he was murdered. She's
fought so hard to
eliminate restraint and seclusion -- I would never want to be that
mother.
That my child could be murdered in a public school -- and the murderer
would be free to
walk around! To teach! It's incredible."
In the near-term, Barton's goal is to lobby local politicians. Then she
will go to Tallahassee, where she says she will make sure everyone in
the Capitol knows her name and what happened to her son. "They're all
going to hear from me," she says.
As Barton explains it, the danger of tenure is purely economics. If a teacher is going to
remain on a payroll regardless of their being fired, it would be
fiscally irresponsible to fire a tenured teacher for any infraction that
is less than
actionable. And how does one judge what is actionable and what isn't?
The alleged abuse of a deafh girl? An ill-advised disciplinary measure for an autistic boy? The only reliable method is to wait until an incident takes place and becomes public. "And
by then it's too late," says Barton. The school board will rush to save
face, the union will rush to defend its own, and the hands of individual
principals and superintendents are tied.
Barton -- who makes a living selling advertising for a publication in Palm Beach County --
has now placed her children in private schools. The difference between
public and private education, she says, is profound. "There are great
public school teachers out there, obviously -- and they deserve all of
our support for doing a tough, important job. But in public education,
there's just no way to easily get rid of the bad ones... Parents, not
unions, need to run our public schools. When you send a child to a
public school in our state, you're sending them into oblivion."
