Your tax dollars at work.
A beloved school therapist has been suspended for 30 days without pay by the DOE for trying to raise money to help a special needs student, while a high school teacher accused of preying on his students is still pocketing his pay while locked up on Rikers Island.
“It’s been a nightmare,” Debra Fisher, 55, told the Daily News Friday. “I really, really want someone to help me, because I’m drowning.”
Fisher, a nine-year veteran of the DOE, got into trouble after sending a fundraising email from a computer at Public School 333, where she works in Manhattan. Fisher had set up a Kickstarter fundraising drive aimed at helping Aaron Philip, 13, put together a book and film to help other disabled kids — a project the school enthusiastically approved.
But when DOE investigators — probing an unrelated complaint against Fisher from a co-worker — discovered her email, three of them hauled the wheelchair-bound boy down to an empty classroom and grilled him for 20 minutes .
Then, said the boy’s dad, “they told him not to tell me.”
“I was outraged,” Petrone Philip told The News. “They pulled him out of class, they scared him with questions about a lady who has helped him a lot, and then they said not to tell me. Is that even legal?”
The investigators, who work for a school system that is under fire for failing to purge perv teachers from the payroll, asked the eighth-grader — who has cerebal palsy — if Fisher helped herself to any of the $16,000 they raised, his angry dad said.
“He didn’t like that at all,” he said of his son.
The dad said school principal Claire Lowenstein had championed the fundraising.
Despite that, Fisher was branded a rogue employee, accused of “theft of services,” and suspended without pay for a month beginning on Sept. 15, according to an account first reported by The New York Times.
The DOE’s “level of aggression” was too much for her union rep, Fisher said.
Philip, who works in the cafeteria of PS 333, said the DOE is persecuting “a solid person.”
The real reason Fisher is in trouble is because she filed a DOE complaint against a co-worker, claiming the woman bullied and harassed her, he said.
That woman, in turn, made accusations against Fisher, including that she was raising money for “her own charity,” the Times reported.
Fisher said she was bullied, but said she was more worried that the DOE’s witchhunting would stifle teachers’ creativity.
“No one will step up, no one will ever take chances with children,” if the DOE punishes those who go above and beyond, she said.
“We have the potential to have a magnificent public school. That’s the school I want to go back to. That’s my school,” the teacher said.
The DOE was zeroed in on Fisher amid revelations that the city hired sex-crazed Sean Shaynak as a teacher despite a 2005 arrest in Maryland for beating up an 11-year-old boy.
Shaynak stands accused of sexual antics with a half-dozen students at Brooklyn Technical High School.
DOE did not respond to a request for comment.
Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for Mayor de Blasio, said, “This appears to be a case of good intentions running up against hard and fast rules. We want all our educators to nurture and support our students.”
