Once again the unthinkable happened—a teacher may have sexually molested his own young students. And what’s worse—it’s not the first time.
Wilbert Cortez, a 49-year-old a computer teacher at a Rego Park school, was arrested on Feb. 16 for allegedly touching some of his students in an inappropriate manner. He had been accused of doing the same at a different school in Brooklyn in 2000, but that investigation ended with a disciplinary letter in his file and a probationary period. He was transferred to P.S. 174 in Rego Park the following school year.
First of all, transferred? From the sounds of the allegations and investigation reports from 2000, this man should never have been allowed to set foot into a school again. There were witnesses that corroborated the allegations, and the internal investigator the schools sent reported that he thought Cortez should be disciplined.
That means the DOE knew there was a problem. Their own investigation concluded that something was very wrong. But they just transferred him. Here neighbor, I found this rabid dog, but it’s not mine—so I put him in your yard. Sure, sounds very responsible to us. In fact, it’s a fantastic lesson to pass on to our youth —nothing’s ever really wrong, as long as you can hide it well enough.
When asked by The Forum why these most recent allegations warranted a criminal investigation when the original claims from 2000 did not, the DOE would only respond that it does not know, because “it was a different administration and special commissioner at the time.”
Hold on.
First of all, you don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know? These are our children we’re talking about here, not questionable pizza left over from the last shift. It is absolutely unacceptable, honestly downright absurd, that the Department of Education (that’s right, education – a department that should know everything there is to know about kids) does not know what charges suggest the need for an investigation.
It should be crystal clear what inappropriate conduct with a child requires a police investigation – any. This is not a game, and the safety of our children is not a joke, to be passed behind whispered hands from one administration to the next.
So we’ve dealt with one problem—the DOE should know its own rules. Problem two: school records, especially those dealing with teacher misconduct, cannot simply disappear whenever the administration changes. That would be like banks burning all their old records every time there was a merger. It’s laughable as conduct for a bank, and it’s simply inexcusable from our schools.
The DOE also didn’t know whether the parents of children who attended the Brooklyn school were notified of Cortez’s conduct after the 2000 investigation. Why? Different administration and special commissioner, of course!
This kind of culture breeds bad practices. After all, there’s no reason to play by the rules if you know you can just reset the game clock every time a new referee walks onto the field. This administration needs to be held accountable. Not just because there are problems now, but because of the damage that will be done if we allow our schools to continue down this path of unaccountability.
But who should be held responsible? Let’s start at the top. School’s Chancellor Dennis Walcott claims to believe any adult who ever touches a child should, “be barred from teaching in our schools if those charges are substantiated.”
Well that sounds fine. Except that in 2000, charges were made, and substantiated by the school’s own investigator – and the teacher was not barred from teaching. He wasn’t even fired, or suspended without pay. He just showed up at a different school the next year.
So which is it? Barred from teaching, or allowed to slip through the cracks, time and time again? It would be one thing if we could believe that this is a rare incident, something that comes up so infrequently that it’s only natural that the schools aren’t quite sure what to do about it. But it’s not.
According to a draft report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, in compliance with the 2002 “No Child Left Behind” act signed into law by President Bush, between 6 percent and 10 percent of public school children across the country have been sexually abused or harassed by school employees and teachers.
Charol Shakeshaft, the Hofstra University scholar who prepared the report, said the real number of abuse cases—including everything from unwanted sexual comments to rape—could be much higher. Using data from a national survey done for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000, Shakeshaft estimated that about 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from a single decade—1991-2000.
With numbers like that, it’s clear there is a real problem here. Much though we might like to believe it, this is not an isolated or rare incident. Sexual abuse of students by teachers happens every single day – partly because of poor, lazy, sweep-it-under-the-rug, pass-the-buck decision making.
Obviously safety is our main concern here, and the reason why cases like this one are so infuriating. But one should also consider the message this sort of conduct sends to our children. Shouldn’t our schools be a model for the young children they allegedly educate and protect? And, as a role model, shouldn’t the school see to it that people are held accountable for their actions? At the very least, shouldn’t it admit when it made a mistake?
