Does your School District have a "Rubber Room"
National Public Radio (NPR) ran a program about the " Rubber Room" program that is operated by the New York Public School System.
So, "What is a Rubber Room?" you ask.
A "Rubber Room" program is an administrative option that reassigns teachers to non teaching jobs until the school system develop an administrative solution to deal with the teacher that is assigned there.
"We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there, and when they arrive, they find out they're under investigation for something. They have to wait in this room all day, every day, until the matter is cleared up. They call this bureaucratic purgatory "the rubber room." Some teachers have been stuck in it for years.
This story was produced by Joe Richman, Samara Freemark, and Anayansi Diaz Cortes of Radio Diaries.
We first heard about the rubber room from a documentary by Jeremy Garrett. There's a trailer at rubberroommovie.com. Jeremy's looking for funding to finish the film, and a distributor. (23 minutes)"
Listen to the This American Life broadcast, #350: Human Resources
But that is New York City, with their massive inefficiency and administrative problems. This couldn't happen to in our school district, could it?
How could a school district operate a program with up to a dozen rooms, filled with between 700 and 800 teachers, each collecting their full pay and benefits…but doing absolutely nothing?
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NY school district Rubber Room
Do you think that this couldn't happen in smaller school districts, but on a smaller scale?
"I think that there are "Rubber Rooms" in every school district. We just haven't heard about them. For the most part, a waste of money and a waste of time. Yes, we should be protecting our students; however, too often, folks know who to play the system and the innocent gets caught up in this mess."
Source
Comment on the Teacher Forum., The Teacher Corner
http://tinyurl.com/2da4ke
While not every school district maintains huge rooms with hundreds of non-working teachers reporting for confinement; this strategy seems to be widespread.
Reasons for the Waste
The cost of litigation is probably the main driver of the "Rubber Room" phenomena. It is probably less costly (cheaper) to pay a teacher for doing nothing for a year than to pay a legal firm to handle the issue for a few weeks or a month. (We have no actual data on school district personnel legal costs as much of this process happens "behind closed doors" and is generally exempt from "Public Information" regulations.
The extent of this money-wasting practice will remain hidden from tax payers and community members.
But, Classroom Toolkit offers a solution.
Solution
Classroom Toolkit is inaugurating the "Laptops for Rubber Room Inmates" Program.
In this program, we will provide laptops with wireless Internet access to every teacher that is assigned to a "Rubber Room."
Then, we will put this talent group of folks that have been "downgraded" (degraded undervalued and diminished) into productive curriculum designers, test item writers, lesson plan developers, and teacher tools producers.
All materials developed by this program will go into the public domain, and become the property of the world of education.
In this way, the "RR - Rubber Room" will cease to be the "RR - Restriction or Retribution" or "RR - Restful/ Restless Reassignment" to become "RR - a Responsible Resource."
Now, we just have to find a "fat-cat" sponsor with more money than brains (like the NY Public School District." Hmm. Sounds like a job for the Federal Government. Candidates, are you listening?
In this way, we will get real and useful work from these talented professionals, and leverage the investment in the laptops.
Sounds good. But, can we trust the NY City School System to be able to keep track of the laptops?
