Darlene Miller's DWI Conviction is Upheld By Appellate Court

 

Darlene Miller

Darlene Miller was arrested in 2011 for drunk driving. She was convicted of DWI, but Appealed the decision to the Second Department Appellate Division, and lost her appeal on April 15, 2021. (see the decision, below). She was removed from The Museum School in 2020 but received her full salary anyway.

For what, you say? For sitting in a rubber room. I do not believe that most DOE employees who were convicted of DWI or another criminal act would be getting their salary for 10 years after being arrested.

In 2018 I was hired to do the 3020-a cases for two teachers at the Museum School. One was a general education teacher who had been at the school for many years and was the UFT chapter leader. The other was a Special Education teacher who entered the Museum school in September 2017, and yet both teachers were charged with 3020-a in June 2018.

My point is that I was fortunate enough to spend three days with Darlene Miller, and can, therefore give you all my opinion. The first day, Miller came in looking disheveled, very similar to her picture, above. She was more or less incoherent, and we wondered whether she was drunk. On the second and third dates, she came in more put together, but still showed an arrogance that led us to conclude we were wasting her time. 

Drink-driving: Principal Darlene Miller, left, pictured here with Assistant
Principal Joel Lowy, right

The AP for the school, Joel Lowy, (Miller's always-willing personal assistant) gave both teachers a Teacher Improvement Plan ("TIP") THE SAME DAY September 19, 2017 and put both teachers into the same ICT math class, so that both could compare notes (and, hire me to represent them at 3020-a, so I could compare their cases too). The TIPs of both teachers were exactly the same, with a few words added for 'special education. How ridiculous is that? Additionally, the Special Education teacher not only had entered the school two weeks prior to getting the TIP, but he had received a "N/A" rating in June 2017 from his prior school from which he had taken a sabbatical, November 2016-June 2017. The protocol for implementing a TIP for a teacher is to have a "U" or "Ineffective" rating.

Lowy gave the Special Education teacher his "new" rating of "U" (unsatisfactory) for 2016-2017 after he called the former principal of this school who told Lowy that she would have given the teacher a "U" if she had been able to do that without a formal observation due to the teacher taking a sabbatical. So, Lowy changed the rating himself, procedures be damned. Lowy then gave the "U" rating for 2016-2017 to the teacher in May 2018 along with his "Ineffective" for the 2017-2018 school year. The teacher immediately filed a Grievance, but the Office of Appeals and Reviews would not hear it because it was a year late. We called in the UFT Rep from the Manhattan office who testified that all of this was proper

 This proves that TIPs have no value except to demonize a teacher and make evaluations into worthless paper. There are no facts in observations. (Elentuck v Green). See also my article about the case of Edmund F Farrell.

 Betsy Combier

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PEOPLE V MILLER (DARLENE)

[*1] People v Miller (Darlene) 2021 NY Slip Op 50315(U) Decided on April 15, 2021 Appellate Term, Second Department Published by New York State Law Reporting Bureau pursuant to Judiciary Law § 431. This opinion is uncorrected and will not be published in the printed Official Reports.

Decided on April 15, 2021
SUPREME COURT, APPELLATE TERM, SECOND DEPARTMENT, 9th and 10th JUDICIAL DISTRICTS
PRESENT: : TERRY JANE RUDERMAN, P.J., ELIZABETH H. EMERSON, TIMOTHY S. DRISCOLL, JJ
2017-2245 RO CR

The People of the State of New York, Respondent,

against

Darlene Miller, Appellant.

Dwight D. Joyce, for appellant. Rockland County District Attorney (Amanda M. Doty of counsel), for respondent.

Appeal from a judgment of the Justice Court of the Village of South Nyack, Rockland County (Thomas Mascola, J.), rendered October 25, 2017. The judgment, after a nonjury trial, convicted defendant of driving while ability impaired, and imposed sentence.

ORDERED that the judgment of conviction is affirmed.

After a nonjury trial, defendant was convicted of driving while ability impaired (Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1192 [1]) based upon testimony and other evidence that defendant rear-ended a parked police car which had its emergency lights activated; that defendant had red and glassy eyes, and an odor of alcohol on her breath; that defendant admitted that she had consumed alcohol; and that defendant refused to submit to a breath test.

Contrary to defendant's contention, the People established at a suppression hearing that there was probable cause to arrest her for driving while intoxicated (see Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1192 [3]; People v Johnson, 140 AD3d 978, 979 [2016]; People v Kemper, 65 Misc 3d 150[A], 2019 NY Slip Op 51855[U] [App Term, 1st Dept 2019]). Furthermore, the court properly denied suppression of defendant's statements (see People v Dougal, 266 AD2d 574 [1999]; People v MacKenzie, 9 Misc 3d 129[A], 2005 NY Slip Op 51535[U], *2 [App Term, 2d Dept, 9th & 10th Jud Dists 2005]).

Defendant's contention that the evidence was legally insufficient to establish her guilt of driving while ability impaired (Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1192 [1]) is unpreserved for appellate review (see CPL 470.05 [2]; People v Hawkins, 11 NY3d 484, 492 [2008]; People v Gray, 86 [*2]NY2d 10, 19-20 [1995]). In any event, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution (see People v Contes, 60 NY2d 620, 621 [1983]), we find that the evidence was legally sufficient to establish defendant's guilt of driving while ability impaired (Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1192 [1]) beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, in fulfilling our responsibility to conduct an independent review of the weight of the evidence (see CPL 470.15 [5]; People v Danielson, 9 NY3d 342 [2007]), we accord great deference to the factfinder's opportunity to view the witnesses, hear their testimony, and observe their demeanor (see People v Lane, 7 NY3d 888, 890 [2006]; People v Mateo, 2 NY3d 383, 409 [2004]; People v Bleakley, 69 NY2d 490, 495 [1987]). Upon a review of the record, we are satisfied that the guilty verdict was not against the weight of the evidence (see People v Romero, 7 NY3d 633 [2006]).

Defendant's remaining contentions are without merit.

Accordingly, the judgment of conviction is affirmed.

RUDERMAN, P.J., EMERSON and DRISCOLL, JJ., concur.

ENTER:
Paul Kenny
Chief Clerk
Decision Date: April 15, 2021

NYC Honors "Diversity" By Ending The Neighborhood School

 Doing away with screening in the admission process leaves many parents unhappy while others are thrilled.

We believe that every child is unique, and has different learning needs and abilities. We believe that diversity of opportunity is a good thing, and therefore we support school choice. For too many years the Department of Education has ignored sub-standard schools - with run-down buildings and narrow curricula - in areas of minority populations politicians chose to ignore.

But is ending the neighborhood school a good move?

The New York City Department of Education is setting up a house of cards that has no supporting services to be successful in this effort to diversify. Many years ago, three years after the Gifted and Talented k-12 school NEST+M opened up at 111 Columbia Street and East Houston, my youngest daughter was accepted to 6th grade after graduating from PS 6 on the Upper Eastside where we live. We were very happy with the immense diversity in her class. NEST+M was a City-wide school and accepted any student in the NYC school district who passed the entrance test.

After a few months at NEST and after some parents spoke with me about how they wish they could get a school bus from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and District 2 in Manhattan, I looked into the issue as a member of the PTA. The school bus companies serviced schools within the District the school was located. Any student accepted to NEST+M outside of District 1, a small dot in lower Manhattan, was out of luck. The owners of the bus companies hung up on me when I tried to convince them that kids in the other boroughs were students deserving of transportation to their school. Some bus company employees were very belligerent in their opposition. They told me, so what if kindergarten students have to take the subway to get there and back home? "Their parents should never have accepted a spot."

I was on the transportation committee, and saw how nasty people could be when confronted with the issue of kids being transported in and out of a neighborhood they did not live in. But we kept our focus on getting the NEST students - in all grades except high school - to school on time, and it worked.

But if the NYC Department of Education does not have a support structure in place to provide for children to be accepted into schools not in their neighborhood, there will be trouble ahead.

The End of the Neighborhood School

 Betsy Combier

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Under New Policy, Selective Manhattan High Schools Offer More Seats To Students Outside District

BY SOPHIA CHANG, The Gothamist

MAY 22, 2021 1:23 P.M.

 • 4 COMMENTS

The elimination of geographic preferences at one Manhattan school district has led to a skyrocketing number of outer borough students offered seats at the district’s most selective high schools, the city Department of Education said while announcing the results of high school admissions Friday.

“The COVID-19 global pandemic interrupted many of our normal school-year practices last year, including a lack of State testing, and revised approaches to grading and attendance policies,” DOE spokesperson Katie O’Hanlon said in a statement Friday. “In the wake of the health crisis, the City announced common-sense changes to the high school admissions process that were grounded in equity and directly addressed the unprecedented circumstances that families and our school system were and continue to grapple with.”

The city’s high school admissions process involves ranking up to 12 schools in order of preference. This year, 77,627 8th graders who applied for a spot at a city high school received an offer, with 55,242 of those students-- or 73% -- receiving an offer to one of their top three choices, the DOE announced Friday. In 2020, 73% of students -- 55,615 eighth graders -- also received an offer to a top-three choice. The DOE said 34,343 students, or 46% of eighth-graders who applied, received an offer to their first choice, the same rate as in 2020.

The DOE highlighted the demographic changes for schools in Manhattan’s District 2, which covers some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city—from the Upper East Side to SoHo and Tribeca—and also includes some of the city’s most sought-after public high schools. Opponents have argued for years to stop using selective screens and district priority in the fight against segregation in the city’s public school system. The new policy is part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's latest efforts to desegregate the school system, including changing the Gifted and Talented process for 4-year-olds and suspending middle school selective screens for this school year.

Read More: Social Distancing Requirements Will Be Pivotal In NYC Schools Reopening Next Fall

The elimination of District 2’s geographic screenings that prioritized local residents have resulted in major shifts in offers this year, the DOE said. The district still applies academic screens during the high school process.

At Eleanor Roosevelt High School, for instance, 62% of offers went to students outside of the district, including a “significant” increase of students from the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn -- compared to 1% last year. The screening change also increased the number of students who qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program (FRL), up to 50% of all offers compared to 16% last year.

At Baruch College Campus High School, 42% of offers went to students outside of the district, compared to 2% last year. Offers to free lunch-eligible students increased to 66% this year compared to 36% last year.

Across all of District 2’s high schools, 60% of offers went to students eligible for free lunch this year, compared to 47% last year.

The DOE said they will also eliminate all other geographic priorities across the system next year, including borough priorities and eligibilities and zones, for eighth graders entering high school in 2022.

Department of Education Deputy Chancellor Sued For Saying "Stuyvesant High School Was Like Being In Chinatown"

Milady Baez

If I live in Chinatown, I should be ashamed?

Two of my daughters attended Stuyvesant High School, and their friends - of all races, sizes and abilities - were amazing, smart, and talented young people with a drive to learn and a curiosity for just about everything.

In my opinion, this "woke" stuff has gone way too far.

Betsy Combier
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NYC Education official likened Stuyvesant High to Chinatown: lawsuit

By MICHAEL ELSEN-ROONEY

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |

MAR 27, 2021 

Former NYC Education official said Stuyvesant High was like Chinatown: lawsuit - New York Daily News (nydailynews.com)

A visit to lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School was like being in “Chinatown,” a former city Education Department official said, according to a lawsuit by another former official who says he was demoted because he is white.

The remark by former Deputy Chancellor Milady Baez came during a meeting nearly three years ago with staffers and principals, said her former employee Richard Bellis, who claims he was there.

At the April 2018 meeting with several Education Department staff members and principals, “Baez crassly stated to everyone about her recent visit to Stuyvesant High School, ‘I walked into Stuyvesant HS and I thought I was in Chinatown!’,” the lawsuit claims.

At the time, Baez was head of the department’s Division of English Language Learners, which put her in charge of overseeing programs for 150,000 students learning English as a new language.

Stuyvesant, the most selective of the city’s specialized high schools, has a student body that is 72% Asian.

According to Bellis’s lawsuit, the DOE’s Office of Equal Opportunity investigated Baez’s remark in 2018. Baez was removed from her position atop the English Language Learners division later that year, but kept working at a Queens borough office.

Baez, who couldn’t be reached, no longer works for the Department of Education.

Besides saying he was wrongly demoted because of his race, Bellis also says he was punished for reporting Baez’s remark.

Bellis is at least the fifth white former Education Department official who has sued the city on the grounds their race led to them being demoted or passed over for promotions under former Chancellor Richard Carranza.

Some DOE staffers have forcefully pushed back on those claims, arguing that Carranza’s leadership helped root out long-simmering racism in the department, and elevated leaders committed to pursuing educational equity.

Bellis was a former English Language Learner teacher who began working at the central office that oversees students learning English in 2007. Baez took over the division in 2014.

He said he worked well with Baez until the April 2018 meeting when she made the derogatory remark about Stuyvesant students — a comment Bellis said he found particularly offensive because his wife is Chinese.

Bellis said he told the Office of Equal Opportunity about Baez’s remark during an investigative interview.

He said Baez and other DOE officials retaliated against him for cooperating with the Office of Equal Opportunity investigation. He claims he was excluded from presenting at an academic conference and was treated “as though he was a poor performer when he was not,” the suit says.
[More Education] NYC Education Dept. bureaucrats call for an end to ‘discriminatory‘ Gifted and Talented program »

Bellis alleges Baez was terminated in June 2018 in the wake of the investigation but reinstated in another DOE position.

Carranza shook up the entire English Language Learners division in late 2018 and asked all staffers to reapply for their positions. Bellis said he wound up in a lesser position after reapplying and his previous post was “awarded to a less qualified individual, who was a person of color.”

DOE officials didn’t comment directly on Baez’s alleged remark or the ensuing investigation, but Education Department spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon said “we strongly dispute these claims of discrimination and retaliation and are reviewing the lawsuit.”

East Side Community High School Principal Mark Federman reportedly sent a survey
to white parents asking them to identify their level of whiteness.                                                                                Robert Miller

NYC public school asks parents to‘reflect’ on their ‘whiteness’

By Selim Algar and Kate Sheehy

February 16, 2021 | 6:16pm | Updated

A city public school principal is asking parents to “reflect” on their “whiteness” — passing out literature that extols “white traitors’’ who “dismantle institutions,” education officials confirmed to The Post on Tuesday.

The “woke’’ offensive at the East Side Community School in Manhattan features a ranking list titled “The 8 White Identities,” which ranges from “White Supremacist’’ to “White Abolitionist.”

The curriculum, written by Barnor Hesse, an associate professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, claims, “There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities.

“People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse writes above the eight-point list.

“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ Hesse adds.

In between the two extreme “identities” of supremacist and abolitionist are such categories as “White Voyeurism’’ — defined as “wouldn’t challenge a white supremacist, desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting’’ — and “White Privilege,’’ or “sympathetic to a set of issues but only privately; won’t speak/act in solidarity publicly because benefitting through whiteness in public (some POC are in this category as well).”

“The Eight White Identities” written by Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse.

The handout was accompanied by a color-coordinated meter with the red zone on the left titled “White Supremacist’’ and the green zone on the far right labeled “White Abolitionist.”

A New York City Department of Education official told The Post that some parents at the school, which caters to sixth- through 12-graders on the Lower East Side, first shared the material with staff.

The principal then disseminated it to every parent “as part of a series of materials meant for reflection” and as “food for thought,” the official said.

A DOE rep said in a statement, “Anti-racism and the celebration of diversity is at the core of our work on behalf of the young people of New York City, and the East Side Community School’s students, parents, and staff partner together to advance equity in their community.

“The document in question was shared with the school by parents as a part of ongoing anti-racist work in the school community and is one of many resources the schools utilizes.”

Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse presents an “ethnography of whiteness” in the ranking list.

The spokesman said school workers are being threatened over the missive.

“Our staff are now being targeted with vile racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs and degrading language from people outside of their school and nothing justifies the abuse directed at our educators,” the rep said.

Christopher Rufo of the Discovery Institute wrote in a tweet that included a posting of the curriculum, “This is the new language of public education.”

The dissemination of Hesse’s literature to parents comes as the DOE and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have pushed to eliminate what they call current administrators’ “white-supremacy culture.’’

The administration has embraced “anti-bias training” across the board, with staffers forced to attend slideshow presentations denouncing the current culture’s “paternalism” and “power hoarding” — while getting sued over Carranza’s alleged creation of “an environment which is hostile toward whites.”

Rufo’s Feb. 15 tweet drew mixed reactions on Twitter.

“If you find this hostile, or unnerving, it’s because you are fearing the loss of power and advantage that your skin color has afforded you. It’s an agenda to bring true equality,” a Twitter user fired at Rufo over Hesse’s chart.

But another writer said, “THIS is what a public school spends time and money on? Anti-racism like this is a poison.”

The racial makeup of the student body at East Side Community was 55 percent Hispanic, 18 percent white, 15 percent black, 10 percent Asian and 2 percent other during the last school year.

The school’s principal, Mark Federman, declined comment through the Education Department.

Federman made headlines in 2007 when he tried to prevent the arrest of a student accused of punching a school safety agent.  The principal was arrested after scuffling with another agent during the fracas but returned to school later that day.

·         newslink Mod • 7 days ago • edited

Some East Side Community parents shared an anti-bias chart, “The Eight White Identities” written by Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hess, with school staff. The chart was then shared with the school community. An article in The New York Post takes issue with it.