…teacher’s actions outside school affected his ability to teach.

This is unbelievable:

But the board’s investigation of the allegations found no evidence the teacher’s actions outside school affected his ability to teach.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4739970a11.html

Spurned dad on assault charges

By LEIGH Van Der STOEP – Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 26 October 2008

A father has been charged with assaulting one of his son’s primary school teachers after the teacher had an affair with his wife.

He says the Auckland school failed to act after the affair, which started when the pupil’s mother began work there as a teacher aide.

He has been battling for almost two years to keep the teacher away from his eight-year-old son, but the school allowed the teacher to take some of the boy’s lessons.

Police say the woman’s 42-year-old husband went to the school earlier this year to retrieve his son’s file, but ran into the teacher. He allegedly patted the teacher’s back “forcefully”, causing him to spill his coffee.

“I put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve won mate’. I was very sarcastic and patronising,” says the man, who the Sunday Star-Times has chosen not to name to protect the identity of his children.

Despite the minor nature of the allegations and that the man has no previous convictions, he was arrested at work two weeks later and kept in police cells for hours, before being charged with common assault.

The man says his son and two daughters knew the teacher was “partly” responsible for the break-up of their parents and he wanted to protect them from the stress of being in contact with him.

The teacher began the affair with the man’s wife in 2005.

When the man discovered the relationship in 2006 he complained to the principal, who told him there had been other similar allegations against the teacher, the man says.

The principal assured the man he would investigate and the teacher would be kept away from his two children at the school.

“It worked well and he left at the end of the year.

“Then we started getting newsletters last year at the end of third term saying, `We’re encouraging [the teacher] to come back… Why would they encourage someone like that to come back?”

Allegations had since emerged of the teacher asking the man’s wife and another woman for a threesome, drinking at the school’s pool after hours, and being drunk and abusive at the local bar.

“The disturbing thing was [the principal’s] attitude that ‘boys will be boys’, that there was this social scene with teachers. I’m not a teacher and I don’t behave like that.”

When the teacher returned to the school at the start of this year the man complained again to the principal and board of trustees, asking that the teacher be kept away from his son.

The school’s response was that the teacher took only occasional maths, drama and remedial reading lessons.

The boy could read “quietly” in the library during these lessons and did not have to have any contact with the teacher, the school told the father.

Meanwhile, the father had given the teacher a “verbal dressing down” on school grounds, warning him not to come near his family.

“It was strong, it was in his face but I didn’t swear or anything.”

This confrontation prompted the school to warn the man he would be issued with a trespass notice. That was put into force following the alleged assault in the staffroom.

The chairman of the school’s board of trustees said it was a “tricky situation” because it involved high emotion and personal relationships.

But the board’s investigation of the allegations found no evidence the teacher’s actions outside school affected his ability to teach.

The school had dealt with the matter appropriately, but he could not comment on actions taken by the previous board which first investigated, he said. “We took swift action when it needed to be taken…”

The father plans to complain to the Teacher’s Council. The teacher has since left the school.

USA – Phyllis Schlafly: The NEA spells out its policies

Things to watch out for in New Zealand:

 

http://eurekareporter.com/article/080727-the-nea-spells-out-its-policies

The NEA spells out its policies

By Phyllis Schlafly

Published: Jul 27 2008, 11:20 PM

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the Fourth of July weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as “Gay marriage causes Global Warming only because we are so hot!,” “Hate is not a family value,” “The ‘Christian Right’ is neither” and “Gay Rights are civil rights.”

The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA’s official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols.

NEA resolutions cover the waterfront of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a “single-payer health care plan” (i.e., government-run), gun control, ratification of the International Criminal Court Treaty, and taking steps “to change activities that contribute to global climate change.”

The NEA fiercely opposes any competition for public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental option plans or public support of any kind to non-public schools. The NEA strongly opposes designating English as our official language even though such a designation is supported by more than 80 percent of Americans.

The NEA opposes homeschooling unless children are taught by state-licensed teachers using a state-approved curriculum. The NEA wants to bar homeschooled students from participating in any extracurricular activities in public schools even though their parents pay school taxes.

The NEA wants many additional job-creating services and programs to be provided by public schools, such as early childhood education (i.e., baby-sitting for preschoolers). NEA resolutions call for “programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8” and for “mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance.”

NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as “the right to reproductive freedom” (i.e., abortion on demand); “comparable worth” (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology rather than the free market); full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women’s Educational Equity Act; and “the use of nonsexist language,” i.e., censoring out all masculine words such as husband and father.

The NEA even urges its affiliates to work for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years ago.

The influence of the gay lobby is pervasive in dozens of NEA resolutions adopted by 2008 convention delegates. Diversity is the code word used for pro-gay indoctrination in the classroom.

The NEA’s diversity resolution makes clear that this means teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender identification,” words that are repeated in dozens of resolutions. The NEA demands that “diversity-based curricula” even be imposed on preschoolers.

NEA convention delegates were invited to an open hearing by the SOGI Committee in Room 149A on July 1. In case you don’t know, SOGI stands for Sexual Orientation Gender Identification.

The NEA urges its members to offer “diverse role models” via the “hiring and promotion of diverse education employees in our public schools.” The NEA puts “domestic partnerships, civil unions and marriage” on an equal footing.

The NEA wants every child, regardless of age, to have “direct and confidential access, without notification to parents, to comprehensive health education. That would include things such as learning how to use condoms for premarital sex, as well as social and psychological programs and services.”

The NEA wants public schools to take over the physical and mental care of students through school clinics that provide services, diagnosis, treatment, family-planning counseling, and access to birth control methods “with instruction in their use.” Family planning clinics are called on to “provide intensive counseling.”

The NEA wants all sex-education courses, textbooks, curricula, instructional materials and activities to include indoctrination about sexual orientation and gender identification, plus warnings about homophobia.

The NEA is very generous with taxpayer money spent on illegal immigrants. The NEA not only favors amnesty for illegal-immigrant students, but also in-state college tuition and financial aid to illegal-immigrant college students.

The NEA is strong for “multicultural education,” which the resolution makes clear does not mean studying facts about different countries and cultures. It means “the process of incorporating the values” and influencing “behavior” toward the NEA’s version of “the common good,” such as “reducing homophobia.”

Of course, the NEA supports “global education” to teach “interdependency in sharing the world’s resources.” It’s also no surprise that the NEA adamantly opposes any requirement that schools “schedule a moment of silence.”

Will parents be silent about the radical goals of their children’s teachers?

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded “Supremacists.” Her e-mail address is phyllis@eagleforum.org.