Fred Jake
May 31, 2009
Now If this is not a reason to start throwing people out of office, I don’t know what is. In the LA Unified School District, there are almost 160 teachers and administrators who are collecting almost $10 million a year for doing nothing while their job fitness is reviewed. All this money is being wasted while the school district is having heated closed door sessions on who to layoff because of a budget problems.
One of the most egregious examples is that of Matthew Kim. Kim, who is a special education teacher, was removed from school and assigned to a district office in 2002 after the school board voted to fire him for allegedly harassing teenage students and colleagues. In the mean school district has spent more than $2 million on him in salary and legal costs. Kim spends his days going through the recommended schedule of a teacher while never entering the campus of any school. His day starts in the morning at 7:50 am, with 30 minutes for lunch and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per the district agreement with the teacher’s union. Remember at no time is Mr Kim to be given any work by the district or show up at school. In the jargon of the school district, Kim is being “housed” while his fitness to teach is under review.
As if they were not bad enough, Kim has been doing this every day since he was let go in 2002. Now Mr Kim is even more special than the other 160 members of this program, because Mr. Kim gets top spend hi sours at home. That’s right, at home. You see the district offices used to house these many employees were becoming too crowded, so they told him to just go through his daily routine at home. So at the tune of over $2 million dollars the district has paying Mr. Kim’s salary and legal costs.
So the next time you here some liberal say we cannot cut back on the money we spend on school because the children’s education will suffer, remember Mr. Kim and the other school employees who never even come in contact with a school. I would bet my next pay check that every school district in the state of California has similar things going on. I would also guess this is costing us taxpayers 100’s of millions of dollars a year, can we get a good old reporter that would do some real investigative reporting for a change? If you want to read more then you can check out the story about Mr. Kim and the others in this LA Times story by Jason Song. L.A. Unified pays teachers not to teach