Students, taxpayers lose in witch-hunt of teacher
General Brown Central School District's legal counsel and designated spinmeister has rendered a fascinating and quite amazing interpretation as to the outcome of the district's attempted hatchet job on teacher Shawn J. DeVito. Stephen Ciotoli, of O'Hara, O'Connell & Ciotoli, Fayetteville, opines in an e-mail quoted in the Nov. 11 edition of the Watertown Daily Times that: "The 3020-a process is designed to remove ineffective tenured employees from our public school districts and, in this case, the process worked. We are gratified that Mr. DeVito decided not to contest the charges at the hearing because the decision saved the district taxpayers significant money."
The inference is that Mr. DeVito folded his hand at the onset of the hearing and tendered his resignation because he feared a negative result at the end of the process. A reasonable evaluation of the facts set in this case leads all but the most biased reviewer to a far different conclusion. Mr. DeVito was fully prepared for a protracted battle in the conduct of the hearing. He had secured the assent of at least a dozen fellow teachers, parents and former administrators to testify to his competence and effectiveness as an educator. He was girded for a long siege.
It was the school district that virtually sued for peace in the immediate aftermath of the hearing's commencement. It was the selfsame counsel quoted above who requested a conference with the hearing officer and Mr. DeVito's attorney to convey the message that the district was caving to Mr. DeVito's conditions for settlement. Strange that he would have difficulty recalling that fact. Mr. DeVito decided early on in this whole wretched witch-hunt that his resignation was inevitable. He had no desire to return to teaching in an unenlightened system where he would continue to be persecuted because of his sexual orientation. His fight always centered on refuting the district's trumped-up charges and setting the conditions under which he would ultimately depart.
Interestingly, after initiating the 3020-a proceeding against Mr. DeVito, the district quickly proffered a proposal to drop the charges, expunge any trace of them from his personnel record and furnish him with a neutral recommendation in exchange for his resignation. How seriously did they regard their own allegations if they could casually throw dismissal of them into the pot as their opening offer? Mr. DeVito took this as evidence that the entire sordid undertaking was initiated with an ulterior motive.
Given that the charges preferred under this 3020-a proceeding were promulgated with less than noble intent, can any positive outcomes, as is argued by the district's counsel, be attributed to it? Certainly, there is very little in that vein that inured to Mr. DeVito. He suffered through an agonizing purgatory while his professional character and competence were unfairly and inaccurately deprecated. Hopefully, he will draw satisfaction from the fact that he was ultimately able to extricate himself with his reputation intact from a school administrative environment that can only be described as Neanderthal. Similarly, there is little to be found in all of this that was a benefit to the General Brown students. Since mid-February of this year, they have been bereft of the pedagogical guidance of a superb teacher and highly talented musician. It will take considerable time before an equally gifted professional can be found to succeed him.
As is frequently the case, district taxpayers are the biggest losers in all of this. Tens of thousands of their dollars were expended on this misdirected foxhunt. Concurrent salaries for Mr. DeVito and two substitute teachers along with prodigious legal fees contributed to the unnecessary financial hemorrhaging. Amazingly, even in the last stages of the process, school officials found a way to waste taxpayer monies. If they had decided to accept Mr. DeVito's terms for settlement, surely that epiphany came to them prior to commencement of the formal hearing. They could have spared the expense of a day's pay for the hearing officer and the stenographer as well as an additional charge to the district's legal bill for hearing representation had they conveyed that message to Mr. DeVito's attorney the preceding day. Carelessness and callousness have hallmarked this school administration's financial stewardship for the past eight years.
The only winners, if you can call them that, in this pathetic saga are a cynical school administration and a barrister with a fee in the offing. They believe the process worked and are "satisfied and pleased with the final outcome."
The writer is a retired French teacher and former French Club adviser at General Brown High School.
