Los Angeles, CALIFORNIA

Two more senior administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District are under investigation.

May 7, 2008 - The Los Angeles Times is reporting that two senior administrators, local district Supt. Carol Truscott and Scott Braxton, who formerly worked for Truscott, have been relieved of duties and assigned to the central office pending further investigation into how they dealt with former Assistant Principal Stephen Thomas Rooney. TT entry for Rooney.

Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines announced the moves. Cortines joined the the school system as the No. 2 administrator last month. Cortines said Truscott was directly responsible for making sure that an internal investigation of Rooney took place and that Truscott and Braxton were responsible for ensuring that Rooney was cleared of any suspicion.

Rooney was arrested in March 2007 for brandishing a gun at the stepfather of a student. Rooney was removed from the classroom. During the police inquiry, allegations emerged that Rooney had conducted a long-term sexual relationship with the student starting when she was 15. Police alerted top officials, but prosecutors eventually concluded that they lacked sufficient evidence to pursue charges, in large part because the alleged victim, who had since turned 18, refused to testify against Rooney.

It is alleged that school officials, however, failed to follow up on the sex allegations. Instead, amazingly, Rooney was assigned as Assistant Principal of Markham Middle School in Watts. He was arrested in March 2008 on charges of lewd acts against a 13-year-old girl. He was later charged with molesting another student, a 14-year-old girl at Markham and the girl he was accused of molesting in 2005.

Cortines noted that 75 current employees are on hold in "non-school" positions pending investigations into alleged inappropriate conduct.
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TT - You won't believe how arrogant school officials were in a meeting with concerned parents at Markham as they lectured them on how to protect their children, as if it was the fault of the parents that their children were molested. We did some simple research on the school.

Two other administrators, the principal and vice-principal at South East High School in South Gate, another Los Angeles Unified School District school, were charged May 1 for failure to report child abuse. Jesus I. Angulo, 35, principal of South East High School, and Maria Sotomayor, 36, assistant principal, allegedly learned of a sex between a minor female student and a 30-year-old substitute teacher seven months after it took place and failed to report it.

We've long criticized the Los Angeles Unified School District for their poor performance. The school district has nearly 700,000 students and a budget of close to $ 19 billion - with a B. (Source: Wikipedia) They are the second largest employer in Los Angeles County. Only the New York City Department of Education spends more money - some $20 billion for 1.1 million students.
The Los Angeles Unified School District overall rating is 4 (with 10 being best) at GreatSchools.net. New York schools rate the same.

What is worse is that both the Los Angeles Unified School District and the New York City Department of Education do not list teacher discipline records. Nor do they allow parents to look up the qualifications of teachers in their schools. For the size of those districts, teacher misconduct should be more than the handful of entries found in online news stories. That failure might be due to the lack of interest in such mundane issues by the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times when they are primarily focused on politics and engineering elections. Even so, taxpayers across California are footing the bill for this fiasco.