Teacher Streams Phony Job

“I feel like a rat in a cage,” said Francesco Portelos, a New York City teacher who’s been living in the twilight zone for a year and a half. Portelos claims that after he “blew the whistle on financial misconduct by school administrators” at Intermediate School 49, he hasn’t been allowed to teach. The school says that he “was extremely difficult to work with” and there are multiple investigations pending against him.”

Although Portelos continues to draw his full salary of $75,000 a year, he apparently is not given any job assignments, and spends his (non) working life in “conference room with a table and chairs and filing cabinets.”

Finally he created a website to “document his allegations, along with a livestream broadcasting his time spent out of the classroom.” Strangely enough, his experience appears to mirror those described by teachers who were banned to those infamous “rubber rooms,” where “teachers who couldn’t be fired due to union rules,” although this situation had supposedly been terminated a couple of years ago.

& & & &
Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.