Inside L.A.'s 'teacher jail': Educators are 'broken, depressed, suicidal'
L.A. teachers facing misconduct investigations have long been confined to administrative offices, sometimes for years
Iris Stevenson and Greg Schiller met in purgatory. It was a room with cubicles facing blank walls, no phones or computers. Here, every weekday, the veteran teachers would sit and write lessons plans for nobody.
The Los Angeles Unified School District still hasn’t officially told Stevenson what allegations landed her in so-called teacher jail. She teaches a nationally acclaimed music program at Crenshaw High School. And almost every year since 1985, she has taken her choral groups on the road to music festivals in Jamaica, Korea, Belgium and, most frequently, France. Last December, their Paris trip was capped by a private performance for President Obama at the White House.
Though the school district did not speak about the allegations against her, the United Teachers Los Angeles union said it heard that Stevenson is alleged to have jetted her students to Paris and Washington without permission. Stevenson said that’s untrue, and that the district has approved her trips every year.
“They knew the exact itinerary,” she told America Tonight, “down to the telephone numbers.”
Schiller, an AP science and psychology teacher at Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, knows what his alleged misconduct is: allowing students to create experiments with the word “gun” in the title for a science fair.
At first, he said he was told to stay home for five days. And then it was off to teacher jail.
“Absolute, complete and total shock,” Schiller said about his reaction. “I worried a lot about my students. What were they going to do without me?”
The experience in jail depends on where the teachers serve time. Schiller said he was allowed to talk, but knows of Inside L.A.'s 'teacher jail': Educators are 'broken, depressed, suicidal' | Al Jazeera America:
