NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, March 22, 2014, 4:10 AM
Called on the carpet for having after-hours sex with the cleaning lady on his desk, “Seinfeld” pal George Costanza pleaded ignorance: “Was that wrong?” he asked his boss. “Should I not have done that?”
That was a comedy. This is not.
The same brazen logic is now effectively the law in New York State public schools — thanks to an appeals court ruling in the “Horndog High” case.
Back in 2009, two female teachers at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School were caught by a janitor getting amorous in a classroom — one naked from the waist up, the other on her knees — on the night of a school singing competition.
Then-Chancellor Dennis Walcott promptly and properly fired both of them for an appalling lack of judgment.
Now, a five-judge panel of the state Appellate Division has ruled that Cindy Mauro and Alini Brito must be given their old jobs back — and may even be entitled to back pay besides.
Why didn’t the court award some on-their-back-pay, too?
The court acknowledged that what the pair did was wrong, but somehow decided that it wasn’t wrong enough to warrant firing. Or, as the justices put it in their unanimous ruling, “the penalty of termination of employment is shockingly disproportionate to (the teachers’) misconduct.”
Excuse us? Consider what would happen if your brother, your daughter, your uncle or your sister were caught in flagrante delicto at the library, bank or office they worked in. They’d be out on their bare behinds, and if they were crazy enough to sue they’d get laughed out of court.
Denying that same basic managerial discretion to school administrators — when the well-being of children is at stake — makes no sense.
Rightly objecting on Friday was Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña.
“If we have a legal basis for this, we will certainly appeal,” she told the Daily News. “We have zero tolerance for this type of behavior.”
Judicial overreach is nothing new for some members of this panel. It includes Justice Leland DeGrasse, who, in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, decided he was better qualified to determine the proper level of school funding than the governor or the state Legislature.
Also on the panel is Justice Helen Freedman, who used her control over prolonged litigation to all but dictate New York City’s homelessness policy for the quarter century between 1983 and 2008.
That judges-know-best mentality fits right into the legal system that makes it all but impossible to fire teachers for anything short of felonious conducts — and it’s not a sure thing even then.
As the Horndog High decision noted, teachers have been known to retain their positions even after getting romantic with students. Yet instead of fighting the tide, the jurists cited the sick and sorry fact as precedent.
Newman, Kramer, Elaine and the Soup Nazi would have had more sense.
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