A technology teacher with a chip on his shoulder has taken a battle with his boss out of the schoolyard and into cyberspace.
Francesco Portelos, 33, a teacher at IS 49 Bertha Dreyfus in Staten Island, has created a Web site in which he posts embarrassing internal e-mails from principal Linda Hill and even the disciplinary letters she has put in his file.
It then chronicles a worsening tiff that started when Portelos accused Hill of breaking the chancellor’s rules by not sharing the school’s $7.7 million budget with a panel of parents and staff tasked with reviewing it, a charge the DOE denied Friday.
Soon after, Hill slapped Portelos with three letters in 10 days charging him with unprofessional conduct and insubordination. She accuses him of screaming at and cursing a fellow teacher — which he denies — sending a mass e-mail to staff without her approval and staying in school past 5:30 p.m. without her written permission.
“I’m just trying to make people aware,” Portelos said when asked why he’s airing the school’s dirty laundry on the Internet. “I’m asking the questions they don’t want to answer.”
More school scuttlebutt from Staten Island:
https://twitter.com/#!/sitweetup/status/180602202426048512
A Port Richmond High School teacher’s aide and assistant football coach was fired this month for allegedly making inappropriate comments to a female student last year — one of eight employees to be fired or reassigned after a review of earlier incidents of misconduct.
“Several weeks ago, I pledged to take a second look at employees disciplined for inappropriate conduct involving students. Since that time, we have removed eight individuals whose past behavior is totally unacceptable for an employee of New York City public schools, and I promise to make sure they never work here again,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement today.
The review looked at the disciplinary consequences of all substantiated cases of misconduct dating to 2000, and was launched after several teachers and aides were accused of sexual crimes involving students earlier this year.
In a letter to principals, Walcott wrote that the eight employees had been “insufficiently disciplined” after Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon found the reports of misconduct against them substantiated.
Though the reports of such incidents are becoming more frequent, there is not yet any media drumbeat about the Public Schools Sex Abuse Scandal.
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