Union gets teacher, fired for watching porn in class, his job back

This is the sort of thing you can imagine, at some point, conservatives might have imagined half-seriously that a teachers' union would do, only to provoke dismissive scoffs from union defenders who would point to the claim as evidence conservatives just hated teachers and would say anything to slander the union.

Fast-forward to the present, and the unions not only do it, but do it with no apparent sense of shame. Andrew Harris was previously a seventh-grade science teacher at Glacier Creek Middle School in Wisconsin's Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District. He was fired when it was discovered he had spent quite a bit of time, in class mind you, watching porn on his computer. Even a teachers' union wouldn't contest that firing, right? Wrong.

---

Watchdog.org reports:

The district's school board Monday voted in a special closed session to comply with an arbitrator's 60-page order that demands Harris be reinstated. He was fired in 2010 after receiving and viewing multiple pornographic and sexually inappropriate images and videos, according to a complaint. To add insult to the district's injury, taxpayers will have to pay Harris nearly $200,000 in back pay. In total the district will spend nearly $1 million on the case, the brunt of which went to legally defending its position that the firing was fair.

The district's admission of defeat in the case comes with a decision to offer Harris a job teaching seventh-grade science at another middle school. So in the end, the taxpayers lay out $1 million, and not only are they still stuck with the teacher who watches porn in class, but the porn-watching teacher himself loses nothing as he even ends up getting paid for the three years in which he was not working. A bunch of other teachers were nabbed along with Harris receiving inappropriate material on their computers, but the school district says its investigation shows Harris was the only one actually viewing the material on his classroom computer. A district spokesman lays it out: “A lot of people are wondering how? Why? Really? Is this really something as an organization they want to stand for? My wife’s a teacher, so I understand they (the union) feel the need to defend their membership. I also hope they would understand why we would feel this isn’t the right decision.” Exactly. Everyone understands that it's the function of a union to defend its members. But do unions care nothing at all for the actual result of the actions they take? What do you do if you're the parent of a seventh-grader who finds out that your son or daughter ends up in this guy's class? Do you request a different teacher? What if he's the only seventh-grade science teacher the school has, which is certainly going to be the case at a lot of middle schools? The problem when you unionize any sort of workforce is that the rules that are established often leave no room whatsoever for common sense. If a teacher is viewing porn on his school computer, the teacher needs to be fired. Period. That's not even a question. Or it shouldn't be. But once you get a union involved, with union rules and union-mandated processes, the firing can't go forward unless every i is dotted and every t is crossed, and the unions make it their business to make it as difficult as possible for all that to happen. And this is what you end up with. Yeah. Andrew Harris's "rights" are protected. And now kids are stuck learning science from a guy who watches porn in the classroom, and no one can do anything about it.