Monday, November 11, 2013

NYC Teacher Franceso Portelos Challenges The Department of Education on The Issues of Retaliation and Secrecy by Betsy Combier - ParentAdvocates.org

Parent Advocates - ParentAdvocates.org:

NYC Teacher Franceso Portelos Challenges The Department of Education on The Issues of Retaliation and Secrecy by Betsy Combier


He started to blog what he found at his school, IS 49, whose Principal, Linda Hill, was hoping she could get away with improper documentation of school funds. And then the Department charged him with misconduct, put him in a rubber room, and submitted a gag order to a Federal Judge. The NYC DOE corruption cannot survive in the open, so they are retaliating against Francesco for his courage to expose their corruption and fraud. I am a big fan of Francesco and his blog.
           
   Francesco Portelos   

Francesco Portelos is a very intelligent man, a charismatic and excellent teacher, father, and blogger. It's the last category which may have been the "straw that broke the camel's back" and landed him in the rubber room - which 'no longer exist' (according to the UFT's April 15, 2010 agreement which neither the UFT nor the NYC DOE give a hoot about). Many people now know, after reading the blogs and websites on the global internet, that government personnel lie....so do union Presidents and staff. The media doesn't get the story straight, either.

(The Staten Island reporter did a better job) As you will see below,Francesco's story is generic, a mixture of DOE retaliation, dislike, exposure of secrets, and ludicrous errors. Francesco won an "A For Accountability" Award from my Foundation. Soon after he was removed from his classroom, I filed a Freedom of Information request for Principal Linda Hill's personnel file. Here are the results of my FOIL request:

Hill-files
school-files

I did not start my blog, NYC Rubber Room Reporter, until 2007. but since I studied the Soviet and American Military Industrial Complex at Columbia University and at Johns Hopkins' School For Advanced