The Department of Education's rooms of despair are not where New York City educators planned to spend their careers.

Although these rooms are labeled Temporary Reassignment Centers, to those who spend their working days in them, there is nothing reassuring about the DOE's use of the word “temporary.”

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a former top Justice Department lawyer who worked as counsel in the Clinton White House, has allowed the TRCs — which educators have also labeled “rubber rooms,” as they are made to feel like prisoners and outcasts — to double in size in the last two years.

Many UFT members have not been told why they are there; and until the UFT started to ratchet up the pressure on the DOE, it had refused to give the union the names of the members in the rooms or the charges against them. However, after a meeting between UFT President Randi Weingarten and DOE Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf, that may change.

For too long, the withholding of information enabled the DOE to keep repeating the myth that educators are reassigned there for sexual assault reasons which, from the union's investigations, appears not to even remotely be true.

And in the city where freedom of the press was established by the John Peter Zenger case 50 years before it was codified in the Bill of Rights, the DOE is now trying to fire a teacher because he “caused widespread negative publicity and notoriety to the HS of Fashion Industries and the New York City Department of Education in general when his unprofessional behavior was referenced in a UFT newspaper.”

Such a move, if allowed to stand, will inhibit workers and their unions from reporting corruption in city government and will render moot the city's whistle-blower law.

Weingarten said the union will take this issue to court as a separate action if not remanded.

The teacher, whose name is being withheld by the New York Teacher, met with Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon's staffers three years ago to report improprieties in the replacement of windows at his school. Since then, this teacher has been targeted by Klein's deputies — one of whom, Chad Vignola, was forced to resign as a result of his role in the hiring of the husband of former Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam.

Anger and resentment

In the rooms of despair, anger and resentment abound. The right to due process and the right to know one's accusers have been buried in a morass of legal documents and accusations from students identified not by name but by numbers or letters of the alphabet.

Ironically, John Gotti Jr. had more rights to a speedy trial than educators, many of whom have spent more than 20 years practicing their craft. A few have been chapter leaders; others are whistle-blowers, or simply teachers tangled in confrontation with a principal.

Teachers suffer emotionally and physically in the rooms; one 8-by-14 room in Manhattan holds 14 people. The Bronx facility, a rabbit warren of broken-down rooms, is a dilapidated school built at the turn of the 20th century where teachers must walk up four flights of stairs and are humiliated by being forced to ask permission to visit the bathroom.

They are escorted to the rest room by a “security guard” employed by a private non-union company, Allied Barton, a company owned by Ron Perelman, who is said to be worth $10 billion.

In Staten Island, time sheets are kept by these guards, leading to one allegation that a guard forged the signature of a teacher. When another Allied Barton guard isn't sleeping during her tour, she sells cookies, candy and fruit to the teachers, a practice that is banned by DOE rules. After the guard was observed going to a supply closet to give a candy bar to a teacher, she insisted to a reporter that “no money changed hands,” even though the guard's colleagues pointed to the “candy lady” when they were asked how a visitor could buy a chocolate bar.

The humiliation in the Staten Island room consists of having to line up like pre-kindergartners to sign out at the end of each day.

Teachers call them rubber rooms because they see what has happened around them. Lives change at home, educators lose their confidence, enthusiasm for life ebbs and there is a feeling they will never be released from their own personal emotional gulag. Even if exonerated, they know there will always be a mark on their back — the rumors always persist. In too many schools, UFT members play the role of Diogenes, looking for an honest man.

Even those charged in the criminal justice system who have had their cases dismissed are victims of moral double jeopardy, with DOE lawyers seeking to revoke their teaching licenses.

One woman who defended herself against an abusive husband was arrested for hitting him; the police chose to ignore the order of protection she produced, even though violating such an order is an arrestable offense. A judge threw out the case but she remains detained in a rubber room unable to teach, costing taxpayers her salary plus $45,000 for her replacement, plus the cost of her “guard” plus the cost of rent for the building DOE leases plus the cost of lawyers to defend an indefensible case plus the cost of the principal assigned to the room.

Various cost analyses of the rubber rooms peg the total costs at between $50 to $100 million, a considerable sum that could be used for improved academics, to lower class size or to fix many a leaky roof.

The rules seem to change when it comes time to judge the DOE bosses. The Chancellor's Office of Special Investigation recommended that then-superintendent for Region 9, Peter Heaney, review an OSI report and “take any action deemed appropriate” against Santiago Taveras, the local instructional superintendent and Jerod Resnick, the principal of Graphic Arts HS. Both were accused of failing to report that teachers at Graphics didn't give the oral component of the Spanish Regents.

When asked if he was reprimanded after the OSI probe, Resnick laughed heartily and said, “I'm still principal aren't I?”

He refused to say whether he got a letter in his file, lost a day's pay or was fined. “I don't think I should be talking to you about this,” he added.

Taveras, meanwhile, was promoted to a job in the Tweed bureaucracy.

The Graphic Arts teachers, however — who deny responsiblity for not giving the oral component of the test — are in the rubber room. They claim they were not given the required materials by an assistant principal who has since testified under oath that she “could have thrown out” school records.

Resnick leads the DOE league in sending teachers to the rooms of gloom — eight over the last several years, a statistical anomaly.

One of the top DOE lawyers prosecuting educators for “failures” in their private lives — not on school time — was himself the accused; a lawyer in his office filed a sexual harassment complaint against him. It was settled out of court.

Not everyone treated the same

At the same time, some teachers merely accused of wrongdoing are sent to the DOE detention centers while others are not.

In Staten Island, parents and educators await the issuance of a report on allegations that the principal of Susan Wagner HS orchestrated cheating on Regents scores. The report, completed in May, has still not been released by the DOE.

In Brooklyn, another principal was caught on a cruise ship using an assumed name after calling in sick. No rubber room for her — she was permitted to retire to avoid scandal.

At a meeting of reassigned educators held on Oct. 30 at UFT headquarters in Manhattan, Weingarten listened patiently for three hours as frustrated rubber room occupants came to the microphone and explained how their due-process rights are being denied by the DOE. If it were a television show, the name of it would have been “Can You Top This?”

Weingarten was told that, in every corner of the city, principals are arbitrarily using the rooms to get rid of staff members who don't fall in line, while, at the sametime, sending an insidious message to all employees: This can happen to you.

Weingarten asked the educators to help her make their case. She said she wanted to give abusive principals their “just desserts” and reminded the educators that “we have to fight for everything. This administration will not — all of a sudden — turn around and be respectful to teachers.” Members told Weingarten about a dean who was trying to break up a fight and was accused of hitting a student; he is in the rubber room. Nothing happened to the students involved in the fight.

A similar fate awaited a secretary who said she refused to doctor a time sheet for her principal; the principal is still on the job.

A guidance counselor said she was kicked out of her school because she had the unmitigated gall to report child abuse, which she is required to do under the law. “That was when my long nightmare began,” she told Weingarten, recounting a long list of physical and emotional problems that she says have ensued since her removal to a rubber room. She said she has had trouble walking and her eyesight has deteriorated. Her principal — who she says wanted her to cover up the abuse — has stayed on the job.

A Caribbean-born teacher told a horrifying story about being asked by his principal to play a “black, ugly Negro” at a staff development meeting. He claims the principal has targeted other Caribbean teachers.

How did it happen?

Many members wanted to know how they suddenly became incompetent after 20 to 30 years of “satisfactory” ratings.

“They are going after senior teachers,” one member told Weingarten. On her first day at her new school, she said, she was asked by the principal when she planned to retire. She claimed that when she refused to quit, the principal falsely accused her of breaching school security.

In the Manhattan TRC, more than half the members have been teaching for 20 years or more.

When a member asked for “investigators, not arbitration” to stop this, Weingarten promised that the union would explore hiring private detectives to probe the veracity of principals' charges.

Weingarten said the UFT “will spend whatever it takes” to get as many arbitrators to clear up the backlogs in the legal process. She also said that until now, “there is no one at the DOE that takes responsibility for this.” She praised the 35 UFT staff members who attended the meeting as well as NYSUT lawyers, who she said “work extraordinarily hard” in representing the members.

At the end of the night, a guidance counselor said “there is a story in every heart,” adding that she was “uplifted” by the meeting and asked everyone to give Weingarten a round of applause.

“I believe things will change and we will get justice” she said.