Remember Francesco Portelos' Threats To Parents?

Do all teachers and parents out there remember that Francesco Portelos , running for UFT President on a platform that includes threats to people he doesn't like, has been cited in two local newspapers as harassing parents?

See Ben Chapman's article posted in the Daily News on July 7, 2014, below. I am re-posting from my prior blog post on Mr. Portelos.

Francesco Portelos

No one is safe from his threats, and I ask all of you to beware.

UPDATE:

I just received the two comments below, and I dont usually publish Francesco's comments, but I decided to post these two, so you all can see how he and his troop work:

"Remember Francesco Portelos' Threats To Parents?"

2 Comments - Show Original PostCollapse comments

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 Anonymous said...

When the election is over, the editorial on Betsy Combier will share all. The AG has been notified.

You made your bed...now you're going to sleep in it.

May 22, 2016 at 2:49 PM

 

 Anonymous said...

Portelos doesn't like Mulgrew either. I like Zucker's nude shot of Sam in angel wings, very funny stuff. You aren't going to get many teachers to defend Sam over Portelos' or Zuckers portrayals.

May 22, 2016 at 3:38 PM

 

Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice

Editor, The NYC Public Voice

Sam Pirozzolo's two children are among of eleven plaintiffs in a lawsuit to end teacher tenure in its current form.

Parents against teacher tenure say they're being harassed by educator

by Ben Chapman, NY Daily News
LINK

Two city parents who signed onto a suit to end teacher tenure in New York State say they’re being harassed by an educator who backs the protection.

Mona Davids and Sam Pirozzolo of the New York City Parents Union say they were targeted by teacher Francesco Portelos in a Sunday tweet.

“U need your protection removed so if you see a disservice to little Franklin P or Eric D u look away,” tweeted Portelos, referring to to Davids’ son Eric, 6, and Pirozzolo’s son Franklin, 11. “Teachers need to be protected so they can speak up for any disservice to students,” said Portelos.

and here is the NY POST article:

The NY POST wrote an article about his breaking into the confidential records of parents:

Teacher’s tweets threaten kids in tenure suit: parents
By Aaron Short and Carl Campanile July 8, 2014 | 2:53am

An angry city teacher recently sprung from a rubber room spewed online threats against the children involved in a lawsuit to end tenure in New York state, the kids’ parents claim.

Franceso Portelos, who was allowed to return to teaching even though charges against him were substantiated, darkly tweeted that another teacher should “look away” from helping the kids of Sam Pirozollo and Mona Davids, who claim tenure protects lousy educators.

“U need your protection removed so if you see a disservice to little Franklin P or Eric D u look away,” Portelos said under his twitter handle, Mr. Portelos.

He was discussing Franklin Pirozollo and Eric Davids, who are among students named in the suit.

Mona Davids, a member of the Parents Union, responded on Twitter: “ru encouraging tcher 2 ignore a child in need.” An hour later, Davids tweeted: “We are taking this threat very seriously.”

On Monday night, Davids said, “He’s targeting our children, my son.”

Portelos denied ill intent.

“No. It was a sarcastic tweet to another teacher,” he said Monday night, while joining 60 other teachers and union activists who showed up at a Staten Island Community Education Community Council meeting to protest the anti-tenure lawsuit.

Portelos also discussed the personal details of the student-plaintiffs on his blog site, protectportelos.org.

He posted a link to a New York Times article about another student-plaintiff in the case, Izaiyah Ewers, who is identified as having a mood disorder and acting out. The report also said the youngster’s mom entered homeless shelters to avoid an abusive husband.

“Really unfortunate story, but . . . Teacher’s fault?” Portelos asks.

Despite his whining, Portelos seems to be the epitome of the kind of teacher for whom the Parents Union is pressing the suit.

Even though a a report by Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon’s office substantiated allegations that he tampered with a school website, and posted student information on his personal website, a state arbitrator refused a city DOE request that he be fired.

He was fined $10,000, and some parents at Staten Island’s Dreyfus Intermediate School 49 defended him as a good teacher.

But the city Department of Education placed him in the absent-teacher reserve pool instead of reassigning him to Dreyfus.

LaborNotes 2014: Myths of Tenure

LaborNotes is a good resource. Worth reading.

Betsy Combier

Three Myths of Teacher Tenure

November 20, 2014 / Samantha Winslow

LINK

In my five years organizing with non-union health care workers who wanted to join the union, job security was always one of their top issues.

Firings were arbitrary, they said. Evaluations were based on favoritism. Experienced employees were fired just because they were more expensive.

So it always surprises me to hear regular people repeat the smears against teachers’ job security. They’re parroting the message of those trying to weaken one of the largest remaining sectors of unionized workers in this country.

When it comes to teachers’ right to job security, you have to look at why management wants to get rid of it—if you want to tell fact from fiction. A few common myths:

Myth #1: Teacher tenure means a job for life.

Teacher tenure is not like academic tenure, which is set up through each university. Faculty members jump through many hoops before becoming tenured.

But maybe the differences are beside the point. Both systems lay out clear grounds for dismissal. A teacher or professor canbe fired—for cause.

K-12 teachers first won tenure rights over 100 years ago, but it wasn’t through collective bargaining agreements. The push for tenure systems came out of the desire to protect teachers and districts from the politically motivated firings that came with patronage politics.

It became a way to protect women, pregnant teachers, and people of color from discrimination. Also teachers with controversial views—read, “pro-union.”

In fact, today charter school teachers are organizing unions so they too can bargain for, you guessed it, job security.

Myth #2: It’s impossible to fire a tenured teacher.

Research shows teachers are fired more often than federal workers—above 2 percent, compared to .02 percent a year. These figures come from Dana Goldstein’s new book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession.

Goldstein also looked at comparable private sector data. These jobs too were more secure than teaching.

If teachers violate policy or can’t do their jobs, it’s up to administrators to make a case to remove them. That’s what due process means.

Myth #3: Teacher tenure is too protective—unlike other sectors’ union protections.

Sure, the process could be tweaked—for instance, expedited, so it doesn’t punish the unfairly targeted and doesn’t draw out the appeals of those not equipped to do the job. (See Union Fights Teacher Jail to read how Los Angeles teachers get caught in a legal limbo.)

But that’s not what they want, the people pushing to get rid of due process.

Look at Chicago, where the unionized teaching force has shrunk by 20 percent, and black teachers dwindled from 45 to 29 percent. Teachers are facing layoffs year after year, while non-union charters grow.

Hard to make the case that teachers have too much job security, isn’t it?

Emboldened by anti-tenure rhetoric, Philadelphia, Chicago, and L.A. have been bypassing seniority provisions in district policies and in union contracts. When budgets are squeezed, districts push to replace veteran teachers with inexperienced hires at the bottom of the pay scale—or not replace them at all, and make remaining teachers do more.

That’s not about what’s best for students. It’s what bosses do, when they can get away with it, in any industry.

When people say, “Teachers may have needed tenure back then, but now things are different and they have it too good,” remember: you could easily replace the word “tenure” with “union.”

Samantha Winslow is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.samantha@labornotes.org