Bad Acts Need To Have A Notice of Claim Filed Within 90 Days

 Under General Municipal Law 50-H, any person who is allegedly harmed by the personnel or acts of a city agency or person must file a Notice of Claim before 90 days following the alleged harm. The UFT and NYSUT used to tell members this at the start of any harassment or discrimination grievance. They dont do this anymore.

As you can see from the article posted below, being timely, and filing a lawsuit based upon the Notice of Claim within 1 year + 90 days is very important.      Notice of Claim Does Not Cover Subsequent ActsLINK

 In a case brought by another law firm, Plaintiff filed a notice of claim about discriminatory acts under New York State Executive Law §296 in 2003. After lengthy absence plaintiff resumed his position with the school district in his suit plaintiff claimed there were discriminatory acts after the notice of claim was filed the Appellate Division, Second Department held that the plaintiff could not recover for acts subsequent to the notice of claim because the school district did not have notice of those subsequent acts. You can read about this discrimination case by clicking here or see below:

Agostinello v Great Neck Union Free Sch. Dist.

2013 NY Slip Op 00052

Decided on January 9, 2013

Appellate Division, Second Department

Published by New York State Law Reporting Bureau pursuant to Judiciary Law § 431.

This opinion is uncorrected and subject to revision before publication in the Official Reports.

Decided on January 9, 2013 

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK

APPELLATE DIVISION : SECOND JUDICIAL DEPARTMENT 
WILLIAM F. MASTRO, J.P. 
DANIEL D. ANGIOLILLO 
SANDRA L. SGROI 
ROBERT J. MILLER, JJ.
2012-02668
(Index No. 15144/09) 

[*1]Joseph Agostinello, respondent, 

v

Great Neck Union Free School District, appellant.

Sokoloff Stern LLP, Westbury, N.Y. (Adam I. Kleinberg and 
Melissa L. Holtzer of counsel), for appellant. 
Wolin & Wolin, Jericho, N.Y. (Alan E. Wolin of counsel), for 
respondent. 

DECISION & ORDER

In an action, inter alia, pursuant to Executive Law § 296 to recover damages for discrimination in the privileges, terms, and conditions of employment on the basis of physical disability, the defendant appeals, as limited by its brief, from so much of an order of the Supreme Court, Nassau County (Cozzens, Jr., J.), dated January 30, 2012, as denied that branch of its motion which was for summary judgment dismissing the cause of action alleging its failure to reasonably accommodate the plaintiff's physical disability.

ORDERED that the order is modified, on the law, by deleting the provision thereof denying that branch of the defendant's motion which was for summary judgment dismissing so much of the cause of action alleging a failure to reasonably accommodate the plaintiff's physical disability as is based on the defendant's conduct allegedly occurring after February 4, 2003, and substituting therefor a provision granting that branch of the motion; as so modified, the order is affirmed insofar as appealed from, with costs to the appellant.

From 1993 to 2006, the plaintiff was employed on the custodial staff of the defendant, Great Neck Union Free School District (hereinafter the school district). The plaintiff served a notice of claim upon the school district, dated February 4, 2003, alleging, inter alia, that the school district discriminated against him by failing to reasonably accommodate his physical disability resulting from a back injury. Following a lengthy, injury-related absence from work, the plaintiff returned to his employment duties in 2005, before resigning his position in 2006 and accepting employment with another school district.

In July 2009, the plaintiff commenced this employment discrimination action, alleging the school district's distinct failures to accommodate his physical disability through 2006. Following discovery, the school district moved for summary judgment, contending, inter alia, that the cause of action alleging a failure to reasonably accommodate should be dismissed to the extent that it was premised on events occurring after February 4, 2003, since the notice of claim did not provide the school district with notice of those events. The Supreme Court denied that branch of the school district's motion. [*2]

As a condition precedent to the maintenance of this action, the plaintiff was required to serve a notice of claim upon the school district within three months after his underlying claim arose (see Education Law § 3813[1]; Munro v Ossining Union Free School Dist., 55 AD3d 697, 698; Cavanaugh v Board of Educ. of Huntington Union Free School Dist., 296 AD2d 369). Since the plaintiff had served a notice of claim dated February 4, 2003, that notice of claim did not satisfy the statutory requirement of placing the school district on notice of those allegedly discriminatory acts which took place subsequent to the date of the notice (see Varsity Tr., Inc. v Board of Educ. of City of N.Y., 5 NY3d 532). Accordingly, the Supreme Court should have granted that branch of the school district's motion which was for summary judgment dismissing so much of the cause of action alleging a failure to reasonably accommodate the plaintiff's physical disability as was based upon acts occurring after the date of the notice of claim.

The school district's remaining contentions either are without merit or need not be reached in view of the foregoing. 
MASTRO, J.P., ANGIOLILLO, SGROI and MILLER, JJ., concur.

ENTER:

Aprilanne Agostino

Clerk of the Court

Leo Casey's Account of The Teacher Evaluations Negotiations

not the entire story, for sure.

Caught In Their Own Web Of Deception and Deceit: 
Bloomberg, the DOE and Teacher Evaluation Negotiations

 by Leo Casey, former VP, UFT Executive Board

Former UFT VP Leo Casey

LINK

After he blew up the teacher evaluation agreement that had been reached between the UFT and his own NYC DOE negotiating team, Mayor Bloomberg appeared at a hastily called press conference yesterday to spin an entirely fictional account of what had transpired. The UFT had made agreement impossible, he claimed, because of our unreasonable demands for more arbitration dates that would make it impossible to “fire bad teachers,” our “last minute” insistence upon a sunset clause that would have made the entire system a “joke,” and a “middle of the night” effort to change the scoring metrics for teacher evaluation so “no teacher” would be rated ineffective. Each of these claims is a lie, pure and simple. Here I will address the last two of Bloomberg claims, as I was personally involved in the negotiations around them.*

To finalize an agreement over teacher evaluations in New York, two different documents must be developed: a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which lays out in legal language the agreement between district and the union over the new evaluation system, and an application from the local school district to the New York State Education Department which provides scores of assurances that the specific evaluation plans laid out in the MOU conform to state law. Both the head of the school district and the head of the union must sign the local school district’s application. During the last week, as the UFT and the DOE met long into the night in an effort to reach agreement on the terms of the MOU, we asked, again and again, more insistently at each turn, to see the DOE’s draft of their application. It was not until late into Wednesday evening, barely 24 hours before the deadline, that the DOE finally gave us their draft of the application. When we read the draft, it quickly became apparent why they had resisted sharing it with us. Included in the draft were  numerous scoring tables and conversion charts which the UFT was now seeing for the very first time. These tables and charts were very important: embedded in them were fundamental decisions about the shape of the evaluation system. By waiting until the very last minute to provide the union with these numbers, the DOE was trying to sandbag us: it was now impossible to properly vet those numbers before the deadline.

The UFT would have been completely justified in ending the negotiations, then and there. But we did not. Our Measures of Student Learning team met with our DOE counterparts and I met one-on-one with Deputy Chancellor Shael Suransky in efforts on our part to put together an agreement over the scoring numbers and ratings that would ensure that teachers would receive fair and accurate scores and ratings. Bloomberg’s description of these discussions could not be further from the truth: far from a last minute effort on the part of the UFT to change agreed upon scoring metrics, the union was doing everything it could to rescue the negotiations from a bad faith maneuver on the part of the DOE that could have easily derailed any agreement. We agreed to a three part solution: a joint UFT-DOE committee would have to approve the growth formulas which would be used for all of the measures of student learning; any scoring metric which unfairly skewed ratings would have to be recalibrated; and a special expedited appeals process would be established for final ratings which were not concordant with the different component ratings. On Thursday morning, I confirmed this three part agreement in a telephone conversation with Suransky. Over many years of working with the Bloomberg DOE, through the chancellorships of Joel Klein, Cathy Black and Dennis Walcott, I have seen a great deal of cynicism on the part of the mayor and the top DOE leadership, but Bloomberg’s lie that the UFT engaged in an 11th hour effort to undo agreed upon scoring metrics in an effort to protect “bad teachers” is surely a new low in misrepresentation.

The Mayor’s claim that the UFT introduced a “last minute” demand for a sunset clause on the agreement is refuted by the very draft application shared with us. On the very last line of this section of the draft application, the DOE itself had written that the agreement would only last through the 2013-2014 school year. The preponderance of applications from school districts around New York approved had similar sunset clauses: given the sheer complexity of the new teacher evaluation systems required by New York State law, they reasoned that it was only prudent to revisit their implementation in a year or two. All of these applications have been approved by the New York State Education Department. It was the Mayor who, after an agreement had been reached with a sunset clause, insisted on undoing that clause and blowing up the entire agreement. The Council of Supervisors and Administrators, negotiating for a new principal evaluation, also had their agreement blown up by Bloomberg on the very same issue.

After two years of continuous efforts on the part of the UFT to negotiate a teacher evaluation system which would provide New York City public school teachers with the means to hone our skills and craft, and provide our students with the highest quality education, it is now painfully clear that Mayor Bloomberg has no intention of negotiating such an agreement.

__________________________________________________________________________________

* When the negotiations on teacher evaluation began two years ago, I was a UFT Vice President, and I served as co-chair of the union’s Teacher Evaluation Negotiations Committee. Last September I resigned my position as UFT Vice President to become the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute at the American Federation of Teachers, the UFT’s national union, but I made a commitment to the UFT to see these negotiations to completion and remained involved in them.

Why did the negotiations fall apart at the last minute? A Vengeful Mayor? Next Steps?

Posted on January 18, 2013

Ed In The Apple

LINK  

Why did the Mayor v. Mulgrew, aka, City v. Teacher Union negotiation crash at seemingly the last moment?

As I noted in a previous blog “the last 10%” is the steepest part of any negotiation – the parties must address the most intractable issues. In the current set of negotiations over the teacher evaluation plan required by state law the parties had been in almost round the clock talks for a week with a January 17th deadline set by the governor.

The negotiation process is “hurry up and wait,” one side makes an offer, the other side mulls the offer, discusses among themselves and eventually crafts a counteroffer, the “mulling” will take hours. At the end each session that parties agree on what they previously agreed upon.

The goal is to sign off on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), and, submit a plan to the state in a rigid template format.

The current teacher evaluation law requires that the parties negotiate the “local 20%,” and the implementation of the 60% based on principal observations.

While critics of teacher evaluation plans rail against the use of assessments based on student test scores, commonly referred to as Value-Added Modeling (VAM) the New York State law requires that 20% of the score will be determined by the teacher VAM scores, or, in non-tested subjects, school/school district created Student Learning Objectives; the use of VAM is not part of the current negotiations.

The state approved plans are long and complex- most are well over a hundred pages long.

After thousands of hours the parties apparently reached an agreement Wednesday night only to have the mayor veto the plan.

One of the union negotiators detailed the process including links to department documents which are direct contradictions to claims of the mayor.

Strangely, the two issues the mayor objects to are not “hot button” issues to the rest of the education world.

The June, 2015 sunset date:

Over 90% of the approved plans, emphasize, plans approved by the commissioner, include a one or two year sunset clause. When asked about the impact of a sunset clause Commissioner King and Regent Tisch both did not foresee an issue. Regent Tisch proffered that the law would undergo changes, tweaks, over the months and years ahead. When the mayor explained that the union will allow the plan to sunset, to expire, thereby undercutting the intent of the law, he is alone, the other 700 plus plans accepted a sunset clause, as well as the state commissioner and the governor.

Is he more perceptive than all others, or, just seeking a reason to reject the plan?

Expedited processes to resolve disputes:

Arbitration is an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process that avoids going through lengthy and expensive litigation. In labor and commercial contracts the parties to the agreement commonly establish a process utilizing jointly selected arbitrator(s); s/he renders a final and binding decision within parameters established among the parties.

The Department, by design, has clogged the current contractual grievance process by forcing the union to take virtually all disputes before an arbitrator – there are so many cases that the process commonly takes more than a year. Once before the arbitrator the Department frequently settles the case – agrees to a non-precedential settlement. The union insisted on embedding a process that would take weeks instead of years.

Expedited arbitrations are commonplace. Under the School-Based Option Staffing and Transfer Plan that was part of the contract in the pre-Bloomberg years teachers could file grievances argued before an arbitrator in an expedited process.

The union and the department agreed on an expedited procedure to resolve disputes – an agreement that the mayor refused to accept.

The mayor has attacked the arbitration process – attacked arbitrators – which is outrageous. Arbitrators are jointly selected and can be removed from the panel by either party. To revile an arbitration process is to revile the rule of law.

January 17th has come and gone – the governor will move forward to reduce city school funding by $250m, which will lead to midyear reductions in school funding and, perhaps, the city will threaten midyear teacher layoffs.

The mayor has raised the ante.

The print media will continue to pillory the union.

Next steps: draconian midyear cuts, with possible staffing layoffs creating anger and finger pointing in the school community. Is the union responsible? Are they simply undermining an evaluation plan that is intensely unpopular among union members? Is the mayor, vengefully, going to battle the union each and every day, regardless of the consequences, until his term ends, with the support of the Post, the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal?

Will the governor allow the city and the union to dangle? To wrestle in the mud? Or, will he pressure both sides, threatening to support the elimination of “last in, first out” seniority laws? Or drag the Mikes to Albany … to Canossa … forcing them to pay homage to Andrew and hammer out a settlement?

An irony: a plan would result in supervisors and teachers engaging in a process to measure student growth at the school level – ongoing discussions about the process of teaching and learning – exactly what chancellors and union presidents want. The teacher evaluation process will identify ineffective teachers, more importantly, if implemented fairly and honestly, it will create a dialogue between school leaders and teachers and among teachers – the “talk” that is at the heart of effective teaching.

* Today, “Canossa” refers to an act of penance or submission. To “go to Canossa” is an expression – to describe doing penance, often with the connotation that it is unwilling or coerced

Rubber Rooms Still Exist, Folks

Troubled city teachers still bouncing around the supposedly shutdown 'rubber rooms' as city wastes $22 million a year

One $78G-a-year teacher practiced softball pitches while in ‘solitary’ at unused locker room and another instructor tallied chairs as disciplinary cases dragged

Comments (33)

By Ben Chapman / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Tuesday, October 16, 2012, 3:00 AM

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/city-schools-rubber-rooms-bounce-back-article-1.1184406#ixzz2ITZ85qD7

Norman Y. Lono for New York Daily News

Ex-teacher Michael Portnoy says he was forced to spend 13 months in an unused locker room after a dispute with his principal and worked on softball skills to ward off boredom.

How The News covered story of city closing down rubber rooms in April 2010.

Educators accused of breaking rules, abusing kids — or simply failing to provide students with a decent education — will be paid a stunning $22 million by the city this year for doing absolutely nothing.
More than two years have passed since city officials and the teachers union announced with great fanfare that they’d found a way to shut down the infamous “rubber rooms” where as many as 800 teachers languished — sometimes for years — awaiting disciplinary hearings.
Since then, the number of teachers collecting a salary to twiddle their thumbs while their disciplinary cases plod through the system has dropped dramatically to just over 200 teachers, but a new kind of rubber room has emerged in its place.

So-called 'rubber room' in Ozone Park, Queens, was supposed to be a relic of the past, but such dumping grounds for problem teachers are still scattered around the city, News probe has found.

It lives now in broom closets, unused offices — even stinky locker rooms — in school buildings all over the city.
“You start to go a little crazy,” said former Bronx middle school teacher Michael Portnoy, 43, who earned more than $78,000 for sitting in a dark, unused girls’ locker room for 13 months until being fired last spring over what he said was an argument with his principal.
Portnoy, who is appealing his firing from Middle School 142, began each day by getting a few hours’ sleep in a beach chair while mice scurried past him on the concrete floor, he said.
He battled boredom by sticking a miniature batting cage to a peeling wall and taught himself how to pitch a softball.
“You ever see anyone in solitary confinement? It was awful,” said Portnoy, who taught in city schools for 14 years. “I wouldn’t go back there for anything.”
Officially called “reassignment centers,” rubber rooms have been around for years, populated by teachers who face disciplinary charges but are allowed to remain on the payroll by a union contract that gives them the right to a hearing before they can be fired.
Before the major rubber room reform in 2010, teachers routinely waited two years for a hearing as massive administrative holding pens overflowed with increasingly disgruntled teachers who read books, taught themselves to knit and led yoga classes at taxpayer expense.
Dating back about a decade since the city overhauled its disciplinary process for firing teachers, they came to be called “rubber rooms” because inmates said they went crazy bouncing off the walls.
“This was an absurd and expensive abuse of tenure,” Mayor Bloomberg said when he announced the new reforms in April 2010. “We’ve been able to solve what was one of the most divisive issues in our school system.”
At the time, teachers union boss Michael Mulgrew crowed that the new agreement would shepherd in a “faster and fairer process.”
And the process has improved.
A flood of new arbitrators slashed the waiting time for a hearing from two years to three to six months, and the number of teachers in purgatory dropped significantly.
The total population fluctuates from one day to the next, but on an average day, there are roughly 200 teachers in limbo, officials say — a tiny portion of more than 75,000 teachers on the payroll.
Last week, the tally of rubber-roomed teachers reached 218.
Their salaries and benefits alone will cost taxpayers $22 million this year, but that’s only some of the cost. The city is shelling out thousands more to pay substitute teachers to cover their classrooms.
But while the big reforms announced in 2010 were supposed to put an end to idle teachers doing nothing, today’s rubber room residents say they’re as unproductive as ever.
Bloomberg said they would be given work to do such as answering phones or planning curriculum — anything that didn’t involve working with children — but several teachers say they’ve mostly just stewed.
“It’s boredom — a cruel and unusual punishment,” said Francesco Portelos, who made headlines this month for broadcasting a live Web video of himself surfing the Internet from a rubber room.

Anthony DelMundo for New York Daily News

Teacher Francesco Portelos blogged and produced live Web video of himself surfing the Net while spending five months in limbo in 'rubber rooms' in Queens.

A science instructor from Staten Island’s Intermediate School 49, Portelos has been kept in rubber rooms for more than five months for allegedly hacking into his school’s website, conducting a real estate business during class time, and tampering with the investigations into his allegedly improper activities.
For the first two months, Portelos was stuck in the bleak basement copy room of an Ozone Park, Queens, office building, where he whiled away the hours by boning up on labor law and blogging about his case.
Education officials then moved him to an empty conference room in the same building, where he broadcast hours of video showing him pecking away at his laptop.
After the city learned of his webcam, Portelos was told to shut it down and work on lesson plans for his classes.
He continues to draw his yearly salary of $75,000.
Former Brooklyn teacher Christine Rubino said she was assigned to an empty cubicle in an administration building for five months and once was told to count all the chairs in the six-story building.
“There were 800 of them,” Rubino said. “They told me they needed to know how many, in case there was a meeting . . . . It was the only job they gave me that month.”
After Rubino tallied all the chairs in the dingy downtown Brooklyn building, she returned to her desk, where she collected her $75,000 salary and surfed the Internet while awaiting the outcome of her case.
The elementary school teacher at Brooklyn’s Public School 203 was fired after making a joke about drowning her students on Facebook.
In June 2010, a day after a 12-year-old Harlem girl drowned on a school trip to a Long Island beach, Rubino ranted online: “After today, I am thinking the beach sounds like a wonderful idea for my 5th graders! I HATE THEIR GUTS!”
She was fired a year later but successfully sued to get her job back. The city has appealed the verdict that went her way in February, so she remains unemployed while her case makes its way through the courts.
Education officials claim that since no more than about a dozen mothballed instructors are holed up at any one address, the rubber rooms no longer exist.
“For some teachers, while that clock is ticking, they shouldn’t be in the classroom,” said city Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. “That’s nothing to be fixed, that’s part of an agreement.”
Mulgrew wouldn’t comment on individual teachers who said they weren’t given work to do in rubber rooms, but said the current system is better than the one it replaced.
“The system has been working much better than anything we have had before,” Mulgrew said. “We did not want a system where people were sitting there. We wanted a fast and fair system.”
The union has not yet formally objected to conditions in the new “solitary confinement” rubber rooms.
“We signed this agreement in good faith with the city and we expect them to follow it. Fast and fair is all we ask,” he said.
With Corinne Lestch
bchapman@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/city-schools-rubber-rooms-bounce-back-article-1.1184406#ixzz2ITZoqxxe

Memories....

Meet Some Teachers WE Pay Millions Not To Teach: Welcome to the Rubber Room [VIDEO]

By bigonkiss Yesterday

YouTube

Here in America we as citizens are expected to have faith in our Government. We work and pay our taxes that keep our Nation or this US Empire going. Education of our Nation should be a priority right? I mean you can’t have a nation of ignorant people trying to govern themselves right? We need smart Americans. We want smart Americans. We deserve a smart America. More than once I have heard someone say that “America is #1 and that is why all the other countries hate us.” Are we really number one? Not even close.

Out of 34 Countries around the World the US is ranked14th in Reading , 17th in Science and 25th in Mathematics. So what is the problem? I do not think it is one problem that can be identified and corrected. But I can point to a general direction and let you decide for yourself. The City of New York has the biggest school system in the US and it will actually pay teachers 22 Million Dollars next year, their full salary, to not teach.

“Educators accused of breaking rules, abusing kids — or simply failing to provide students with a decent education — will be paid a stunning $22 million by the city this year for doing absolutely nothing.”

Now hold on you may be saying. Breaking rules? Abusing Kids? I did not report to you that the teachers had to be convicted of these offenses,  only that they be accused. It takes only one upset, emotional and confused accusation from a teenager to start an investigation process that pulls a teacher from their class and places them in a room with nothing to do. The Rubber Room. They still get up, go to school for work then sit in a room and count the seconds until 4 o’clock when they can go home. The process could take weeks, months and sometimes years to conclude. Millions and millions of dollars from the Department of Education each year go to rooms full of teachers with no students in front of them.

Once assigned to a Rubber Room, teachers are often shunned by their peers and former school administrators. A general atmosphere of taboo will in many cases follow them for the remainder of their careers, long after they have returned to regular teaching and even, in many cases, after having been fully acquitted of their accusations.

This is a documentary that you need to see.

VIDEO

The Rubber Room:

Unfortunately it was made in 2008. What have we done since then? Oh the room still exists. It lives now in broom closets, unused offices — even stinky locker rooms — in school buildings all over the city and I am afraid the nation.

“You start to go a little crazy,” said former Bronx middle school teacher Michael Portnoy, 43, who earned more than $78,000 for sitting in a dark, unused girls’ locker room for 13 months until being fired last spring over what he said was an argument with his principal.

Some of you may say that The Rubber Room allows teachers guilty of criminal misconduct to remain on the public payroll, being paid a full salary to sit and do nothing. On the other side, there are those of you who see the entire process, although initially created as an instrument to protect child safety, has now been expanded into a lethal weapon, used by principals and other administrators to remove teachers from their classrooms based on minor insubordination, personality conflicts, or even for budgetary reasons such as making way for a new replacement teacher who will be paid a far lesser salary.

Although your opinions vary with respect to Education in America or lack there of and The Rubber Room, they do seem to share one common denominator: they are impassioned, sometimes inflammatory, and never positive. Let’s look at it another way, it would be extremely difficult to find an individual, either working in New York City education or not, who thinks The Rubber Room is a system that works even moderately well.

I worry for our future. -Biggy

Andrew Gordon To Leave The DOE this Week

Andrew Gordon is leaving the DOE on January 25 to become Director of HR at NYU.

PS 4 Teachers Angered By Their "U" Ratings

In the evaluation process U ratings are meaningless because there are no facts in observations. Nonetheless, careers are ended after a U rating in the senseless destruction of good teaching in NYC.

Teachers at Public School 4 in Crotona balk at having highest rate of unsatisfactory instructors, per report 

Parents shocked that "A" rated school could be home to so many poor teachers

Principal Vincent Resto

 

Comments (3)

BY CORINNE LESTCH / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2013, 6:00 AM

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/studentsfirstny-reform-group-issued-report-article-1.1239940#ixzz2I75v4JDJ

Teachers at Public School 4 in Crotona fumed about landing on a list of schools with poorly rated instructors.

Principal Vincent Resto doled out unsatisfactory ratings, dubbed “U-ratings,” to more than a third of the teachers at the K-8 school, according to a recent report from StudentsFirstNY, an education reform group.

“It’s not the teachers, it’s the program we’re asked to teach,” slammed one teacher who admitted he was one of 11 who were branded ‘bad.’

“We’re asked to do the impossible,” the teacher continued. “We’ve had 19 teachers leave since the start of the school year. What does that say? The administration is the problem.”

According to state statistics, the turnover rate of teachers with fewer than five years of experience at the school has climbed to nearly 60% in the 2009-10 academic year.

Another school employee who declined to give her name said teachers are not the problem.

“It’s the principal,” she said. “He’s not very popular among the staff.”

Resto, who started his post in 2007, did not return a request for comment Monday.

Parents were shocked that the A-rated school is filled with bad apples.

According to the same report, nearly 80% of fourth-grade students are proficient in math, and about 70% of eighth-grade students are proficient in math.

JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

PS/MS4 was deemed the school in the city with the highest percentage of unqualified teachers. The school has 11 teachers who earned “U” ratings in the 2011-2012 school year.

 

“My daughter always says how wonderful all of her teachers are,” said Altagracia Acosta, whose daughter is in eighth grade. “I feel that they do a great job here.”

Other Bronx schools that fared poorly include Junior High School 22, Fordham High School for the Arts, Fordham Leadership Academy, Banana Kelly High School and Monroe Academy for Business and Law. At each of these schools, about 20% of teachers were slapped with U-ratings.

The poorest areas of the Bronx had schools with the highest concentration of U-rated teachers, according to the report.

The report offers this recommendation: implement a comprehensive teacher evaluation system, though the city and teacher’s union have been at odds about how to effectively rate instructors.

If the stalemate continues past the Jan. 17 deadline, the state will withhold $250 million in funding.

clestch@nydailynews.com