LAUSD'S PREMEDITATED "EGREGIOUS MISCONDUCT"- A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY?
(Mensaje se repite en Español)
How did the LAUSD School Board unanimously vote to fire famed teacher Rafe Esquith? The answer might surprise you as it is codified in law. According to The Brown Act section 54956.9 the board is compelled to side with the administration and district legal if there is even potential "exposure" to litigation as there is here for the wrongful termination, age discrimination, defamation, and other clear violations of LAUSD teachers' civil rights that LAUSD administration continues to engage in.
Simply stated, the Board only gets improper and/or false information from their administration and their expensive hourly outside attorneys, whose only desire is to cover up their own guilty of civil and criminal violations of law against the District and its employees. The LAUSD Board has no other mechanism for garnering correct information. Even if, as here, LAUSD administration is not carrying out Board Policy and Procedure and/or acting legally, no mechanism exists to correct purposeful administrative deficits and wrongdoing.
This relegates the LAUSD Board to the sole function of rubber stamping all LAUSD administrative actions, when administration asserts that the district might be subject to litigation.
Whether or not this potential litigation is justified or whether LAUSD has and continues to function in a self-serving and often illegal manner remains out of the purview of the LAUSD Board, hidden behind closed doors in closed session away from public scrutiny or accountablity.
Just one example of how this captive LAUSD Board without discretion functions might be seen in focusing on the LAUSD Office of Inspector General's Office (OIG). Instead of functioning as an independent body that monitors LAUSD administration for improper actions and reports directly to the LAUSD Board as the national standards of inspectors general requires, the OIG is under the LAUSD Superintendent and functions as a secret police charged with building cases against "enemies" like teacher Rafe Esquith and the thousands of other top-of-the-salary scale teachers whose removal by hook or by crook only benefits LAUSD's self-dealing administration both financial and in allowing their improper actions to continue unchallenged.
The fact that LAUSD saves approximately $60,000 in just the first year for the mostly top-of-the salary scale teachers they get rid of is never mentioned as a motive that the district might have for falsely charging and discharging thousands of teachers, a disproportionate and statistical impossible number of whom are over 40, at the top of the salary scale and/or about to vest in expensive lifetime health benefits
What has not occurred to corrupt administrators or their outside high-priced getting rich on teachers' grief attorneys whose only concern seems to be how many hours they can bill- and not the clearly illegal criminal conspiracies they are engaged in- is that first and foremost Attorney Mark Geragos is a criminal attorney with an intimate understanding that the Penal Code supercedes both the Education Code and the Brown Act, when it comes to judging what their fiduciary duty is to both LAUSD and the certificated and classified employees they continue to target in bad faith and in clear violation of both civil and criminal law.
What Rafe Esquith, Mark Geragos, and the thousands of LAUSD employees who have been criminally assaulted by LAUSD administration and the morally challenged administrators and lawyers, who continue to violate the law, is that these folks have made no attempt to hide their illegal behavior, which should make holding them accountable all the more straight forward a process in a neutral legal forum where they no longer call all the shots. One can only hope that such a forum still exists in corporate America.
Some probative questions LAUSD administrators might have trouble answering under oath and penalty of perjury:
1. Where are the police reports that substantiate crimes and "egregious misconduct"?
- In the vast majority of cases and in specifically Rafe Esquith's case, the teacher was cleared of all wrongdoing in the past. If there was any basis for firing Esquith, why wasn't it done in 2006, when some of the charges were initially made and found to be completely without merit? Why have additional charges against Esquith and others only been added in response to Esquith's or others refusal to roll over and resign, the way most LAUSD teachers have been forced to do? Is there a clearly provable pattern of LAUSD improper actions against teachers?
2. Are the standards used by LAUSD to investigate allegations of "egregious misconduct" consistent with the Penal Code standards that the Education Code calls for?
- Bringing students into the principal's office and interrogating them until they are coerced into bearing false witness against their teacher seems questionable. Firing a teacher without any verified charges made under penalty of perjury or without intimidation are a sine qua non to anything that even remotely resembles a legally permissible action.
3. Since many of the codified categories mandated by the Education Code and Penal Code DO NOT apply to the teachers who have been placed into teacher jail, under what legal authority are teachers put into teacher jail and subsequently terminated without any finding of guilty and in complete derrogation of the legal presumption of their innocence?
- Superintendents Deasy and Cortines have often defended the use of teachers' jail as justified in protecting innocent children. But they have never explained why keeping them home until an independent investigation took place is not as adequate, even though they finally did this with most teachers. Yes, intimidation and forcing the teacher to retire seems to be their clear and only motive. And both Deasy and Cortines citing student safety to justify never allowing a once targeted teacher back in the class, even if they have been cleared by the police smacks of illegality.
The sole economic motive for LAUSD to place teachers into teacher jail is a mathematical and statistical certainty of age discrimination: 93% of teachers placed into teacher jail are over the age of 40. This is a statistically impossibility for a random event. See Biddle Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact. The statistics alone when compared to the overall teaching population of LAUSD shows a clear Disparate Treatment and intentional discriminatory policy toward veteran teachers. This egregious conduct by LAUSD no doubt will be called into account in the Esquith class action brought by Geragos & Geragos.
And in closing, one cannot help remarking about the deafening silence coming from United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), when it comes to the Esquith case and the thousands of other that have been joined in what might be the largest class action suit dealing with public education in history. Could LAUSD's morally challenged administrators have illegal gone after and destroyed the careers and lives of so many teachers without the complicity of UTLA that clearly had the power to confront LAUSD under the LAUSD-UTLA Collective Bargaining Agreement, but choose to do nothing. One can only hope that this will earn them a place as named defendants in the lawsuit.
If you or someone you know has been targeted and are in the process of being dismissed and need legal defense, get in touch:
Lenny@perdaily.com
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