A judge tore into city investigators Thursday for a shoddy probe that cost a teacher his job at a Manhattan school for kids with emotional and legal problems.
The decision means Charles Bryant can reclaim his teaching license and possibly get his job back at Public School 35M.
He was in his first year as a teacher there after nearly 20 years working as a teacher’s aide with troubled students at Rikers Island and a Manhattan hospital.
“I don’t know whether to jump in the sky yet, but I’m really overjoyed,” Bryant told the Daily News. “I love teaching – it’s my calling; it’s what I do.”
In her decision, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Emily Goodman slammed the Department of Education’s Office of Special Investigation for a one-sided report on the encounter between Bryant, 44, and Charles Cherry, 16.
Cherry said he got into a fight with Bryant and the teacher punched him and poked him in the eye.
The school’s principal took the word of Cherry and three pals – and the Education Department investigator based his findings largely on the principal’s statement, Goodman said.
Meanwhile, the investigator ignored a police captain’s finding that the student’s story “did not hold up,” the judge wrote.
“It is extraordinary that the investigator could base his findings on the principal’s statement when, according to his own report, she was ‘unsure’ of what Cherry said,” Goodman wrote. “Such uncertainty as the basis for ending a man’s productive life shocks the conscience.”
See how a first-year teacher gets railroaded when there isn’t due process?
That’s why NYC teachers have tenure, which, in NYC isn’t a lifetime appointment to the job, but a guarantee of due process.
Funny how this story comes out just two weeks after the NY Post, NY Daily News, and the Mayor began their smear campaign against teachers and tenure by lying about what it actually is.