Surviving a Low Blow How five dedicated educators overcame devastating accusations, and who rallied at their side. More...

Photo by Scott Suchman

Also in this story... What you can do to avoid unfounded accusations What your Association can do for you What is fair treatment?

 By Alain Jehlen

Photo by Steve Peterson

Six months after he was accused of fondling high school girls in his class, Brian (not his real name) felt his life had hit bottom. "My wife and I were afraid even to go to a restaurant because someone might recognize me," he recalls. "One evening we ordered a pizza. The delivery boy came and dropped it off, and when we opened the box, there was a note from a former student, a girl who must have been working at the pizza place. She wrote, 'Hang in there. I believe you.'"

For Brian, the worst was yet to come, but knowing that girl trusted him helped him survive the long ordeal.

An unfair, unfounded, horribly damaging accusation--this is the stuff of nightmares. Fortunately, most educators never experience the real thing. But those who do need all the support they can get from family, friends, colleagues, and their union.

That's why NEA and its state affiliates devote significant resources to the legal protection of their members.

This month, we present the stories of five NEA educators who suffered and survived unfair attacks.

Three were accused of serious offenses--sexual abuse, emotional abuse, helping students cheat--that would have merited severe consequences if the charges had been true. These stories raise the question of how authorities should respond to complaints from parents and students. (See "What is fair treatment?" on page 28.)

The fourth case involves a false claim that the employee took a two-hour lunch and wouldn't admit it. For a hint as to why a long lunch was considered grounds for dismissal, it might help to know that this person founded the local union.

Then there's a case in which an educator was accused of posting defective high-stakes test questions on the Web. School officials tried to take his license away, but his Association defended him, and a judge finally ruled that he was protected by his right to free speech in the public debate over the test.

Unfortunately, educators cannot always count on fair treatment. That's one of the reasons we need unions.

"There is no way I would ever walk through the classroom door without membership in NEA," says Ruth, the teacher falsely accused of emotionally abusing second-grade boys. And she adds, "When it first happened, I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. I didn't want anyone to know. Now, I want everyone to know that one lie can suck the life from you."

Aside from providing individual help, NEA local and state Associations also work to improve the laws and contracts that determine an educator's rights.

What cases can be, or must be, arbitrated? What categories of educators can only be dismissed for "just cause" and what does "just cause" mean? Some of these matters are decided by state legislatures. Others are determined by each school district, often through collective bargaining.

But there's another lesson to be learned from these stories besides the importance of a strong union, and that is, don't just leave it to the lawyers to defend your colleagues. All of these victims needed strong personal support from friends, family, and fellow educators.

They needed someone to say, "Hang in there. I believe you."

Accusation: Sexual harassment

Brian's story could have come from the pen of Franz Kafka. He was suspended from his job in January 2000 and told there were allegations that he sexually abused students, but he was told no specifics. He was fired in March. He was arrested in August, handcuffed in his driveway as he was about to go pick up his two-year-old son from his parents' house. At the police station, he pleaded to make a phone call but the arresting officer turned him down, claiming the police could hold him for 48 hours without letting him call anyone. (Not legally, says his lawyer.) Finally, a second police officer prevailed on the first to let Brian call his parents for the sake of the two-year-old, but Brian was warned not to reveal where he was or why he couldn't pick up his son. Knowing arrest was possible, Brian's mother guessed, however, and his lawyer raced to the police station and bailed him out.

All this time, Brian and his two lawyers (one from his Association to fight for his job and one referred by the Association for criminal defense) were in the dark as to what he had been accused of. It wasn't until a preliminary court hearing in September that they learned the names of his accusers and what they were saying.

Two girls claimed that Brian had repeatedly brushed against them and touched their breasts in class. One said he had held her breast for about five seconds--in full view of the other students. "It was almost a relief to finally know what I was accused of," says Brian, "but there was also a sense of anger--how could all these administrators and police officers believe this? How could a teacher behave like that for weeks and not have another student report it?"

One of the girls had been doing badly in a remedial class, which she was already taking for the second time, and she had told him she was afraid of what her mother might do. Brian thinks this may be what started the whole terrible sequence.

Brian's wife, four months pregnant with their second child, sat through the hearing with him. The next day, she miscarried. "We had already heard the heartbeat," says Brian. Their friends had not known about the pregnancy, so Brian and his wife mourned alone.

But 2001 was a new year. Brian's trial began the first week in January, nearly a year after he was suspended. Brian's lawyer called as witnesses students who had been sitting all around the accusers. None had seen anything. Then he poked a series of holes in the girls' testimony and the school district's investigation.

As the trial neared its end, Brian felt optimistic. But when the jury went out, his confidence crashed. He had been working with the lawyer, week after week, to nail down every aspect of the case, which gave him a sense that he had some control over events. "All of a sudden, there's nothing else you can do. You go from empowered to powerless in about a minute. My life was now in someone else's hands."

Brian was acquitted. When it was over, the bailiff said to him, "My father was a principal and would have loved to have you as a teacher. I knew you didn't do it."

Then it was on to the arbitration hearing over the district's decision to fire him. Unlike the criminal trial, which took less than a week, the arbitration hearings were spread out, about one day per month, for nearly a year.

More agony, more suspense, but finally, complete vindication in a stinging decision in which the arbitrator sharply criticized the school administration's handling of the case. "It is my...hope that the District will comply with this Award, put an obviously talented teacher back in the classroom, and give a community some end and closure to a very hurtful episode," she concluded.

So today, Brian is back teaching social studies at the same school.

"I absolutely love what I do," he says. "I look forward to going in every day. For nearly three years, my wife and I would pray together, 'Please, if I'm not to teach, make it so it doesn't hurt so bad not being in there.' I prayed that if God didn't want me to be a teacher, he would take away my love and passion to go back in. It never went away."

But these days Brian is very, very careful.

Which is a pity, not just for him, but for his students.

"If I'm walking down a long hallway and I see a girl alone, I'll take another hallway. I do not want to walk past a girl in a hallway alone. I won't want to send a note congratulating a girl who's had a hat trick in a hockey game because somebody will say, 'Oh, he's hitting on her.'"

"When I was a student, I didn't like school. There are things I wish teachers had done for me that might have made it better, but now I don't want to do those things because people might read it the wrong way."

Accusation: Emotional abuse

Somewhere in Tennessee, there's a fifth-grade teacher who just couldn't stay away from the classroom even though her last job landed her in the hospital. She was accused, picketed, dragged through the mud in the press, defended, vindicated, and finally fled teaching to take a job selling insurance.

But then she dropped in at a teacher job fair--just to look--and decided to apply for a job. The interviewer was candid: You have excellent credentials and two outstanding letters of recommendation. But your third letter...

She told him she had a problem in her last job, which she did not want to talk about, but hoped he would hire her based on everything else before him.

"Everyone deserves a fresh start," he said.

"I truly, truly love it!" she says now. "You're treated like a professional and you have support. They have high expectations for kids, and they expect them to behave."

It's a happy ending to an unhappy story. But to tell it, we can't use her real name so we'll call her Ruth.

Ruth's story begins in August 2000, on the first day of school. She was teaching second grade, as she had for many joyful years, but this time she found a little hellion in her class. "From day one, he was hitting, screaming, slapping, burping in people's faces," she said. "He had been that way from kindergarten. On the second day, he threw a chair that bounced off a table and hit another child.

"I sent letters home but the parents were of no help. One day, his father did come in and the two of them were screaming at each other."

Matters came to a head in October when Ruth took her pupils on a field trip to a farm, during the course of which her problem child hit one little boy over the head, blacked a girl's eye, punched another boy in the stomach, attacked a farm dog, knocked over a chaperoning mother and her baby, and grabbed all the pumpkins.

"I finally did yell at him that day, it's true," says Ruth.

Ruth struggled through the rest of the year with little help from her principal. "I'd send the boy to the office and he'd come right back. There were no consequences for his disruptions, such as in-school suspension."

Then the principal started telling Ruth that some parents were complaining she was coming down too hard on their children. But there was never a face-to-face meeting where she could confront the claims. The stress built higher and higher until one day in March, she felt a strong tingling in her arms and was rushed to the hospital. The staff thought she was having a heart attack and medicated her. An allergic reaction to the medicine nearly killed her.

Ruth recovered and went back to work, but suddenly in May she got a letter from the state child protection agency. Two parents had charged that she had emotionally abused their children. The second child, ironically, was the one who was punched in the stomach on the field trip, a boy from a severely troubled home but one whom Ruth had felt she could reach and help.

Ruth's NEA UniServ director went with her to the agency office. The social worker there wasn't interested in hearing Ruth's side of the story, or in school records that documented the children's problems before they entered her class. Psychological tests showed they had emotional problems and therefore Ruth was guilty. The social worker began proceedings to have Ruth listed in the state's child abuse registry, which would involve a hearing in the fall. After that, her teaching license could be revoked.

The UniServ director immediately arranged for legal representation, and Ruth and her lawyer worked over the summer preparing her defense. The toughest school year of her career turned into the worst summer of her life. "I couldn't sleep or eat. I didn't care about anything--my flower garden had so many weeds you wouldn't think it was a garden. I was on anti-depressants twice a day."

When she showed up for work on the first day of school, she found a group of parents picketing her with signs reading "No excuse for child abuse," and a cluster of journalists recording the event. "I wanted to die. If it hadn't been for the support of my family, I probably would have died," says Ruth of those bleak days.

But her life began to turn around in November at the hearing on putting her in the child abuse registry. The social worker admitted that she had not interviewed the teaching assistant who was in the classroom most of each day. Not a single question had been asked of the only other adult witness to the alleged abuse.

The social worker explained that she didn't need to check out the two seven-year-olds' claims that Ruth yelled and berated them because children always tell the truth in such situations. Ruth could see the hearing officer wasn't buying it.

Another date was scheduled for her defense, but before then, Ruth's lawyer got a call. The social worker would drop charges if Ruth promised not to sue. She agreed.

That should have been the end of Ruth's ordeal, but it wasn't. Her principal continued to provide no support, clearly trying to get rid of her. Worn out, her health failing, Ruth resigned and took a job selling insurance. Almost overnight, her medical symptoms disappeared. Her new employer treated her with respect--and she loved being able to go to the bathroom whenever she needed to.

But still, "There was this yearning. I would take my granddaughter to her school events, walk down the halls, and really miss being in a classroom."

So this fall, Ruth is happily teaching again. But she bears vivid scars. "I'm still on pins and needles, afraid that some other parent will do something like this to me." And she has this advice for colleagues around the country: "If you have a problem, document everything. This can happen to you."

Accusation: Helping students cheat

For Loretta Gonzales, the moment of truth came on the fourth day of her arbitration hearing on charges that she had cheated with her summer school math students on an important exam. Gonzales had been summarily thrown out of the job that was her mission in life as well as her livelihood, and she was battling to win it back.

Now the school district's attorney called one of Gonzales' low-income, Mexican-American students to the stand, grilled her on the material in her algebra notebook, and challenged her to work out a problem like those on the test--on an overhead projector in front of a roomful of adults.

"She got up, and she knew the answers," Gonzales remembers. "And I'm thinking, 'Yes, yes, you can do this!' This girl had been a habitual truant, but with me, she came to class every day. All over that notebook were her grandmother's initials on all the voluntary homework she had done, and she was so proud of it. When they finally let her go, she turned to the judge and said, 'Now, can I have my notebook back, please?'"

More students followed the first girl. All knew their math.

And two months later, Loretta Gonzales was teaching again.

Gonzales had grown up in a family much like this girl's. "My father was a migrant with a second-grade education. My mother was a Lakota Indian from the reservation. She was forced to go to a Catholic boarding school where the policy was to 'take the Indianness out of the Indian.' She dropped out in 10th grade.

"From when I was a little girl, I loved learning and loved school. In second grade, I thought my teacher was the best person in the world because she taught me to spell 'red' and 'blue' and words like that."

In high school, despite her good grades, she was not allowed into the college track. "Someday, you're going to have babies, and you'll need to support them," her counselor explained, placing her in shorthand, transcription, and typing classes.

But the Hispanic civil rights movement was gaining strength in Colorado and the first Hispanic teachers and administrators were coming into the school system. One of them helped this studious, capable girl get into a University of Colorado program that offered scholarships for promising Mexican-American students. Gonzales went on to a master's degree and a job teaching math and other subjects to high school special education students.

When she learned that Denver badly needed summer school teachers, she thought she could help out and also earn some extra money to put her own son through college.

She never imagined the five-week summer job could end her teaching career.

Gonzales' problems in the program started early. She wanted to teach algebra in the way she had been trained, but the summer school administrator at her school wanted a different approach. They had many other disagreements, but Gonzales thought they were all limited and manageable.

Then during the mid-term exam, someone she didn't know came into the room and asked her to step into the hall and talk. Later, she would learn he was a central office administrator, invited to the school to check on her, and he thought he had seen two students swapping answers. But he didn't identify himself, and Gonzales refused to leave since she was in the middle of giving a test.

Several tense and confusing altercations later, Gonzales found herself suspended from working the rest of summer school.

"I was confused and hurt," says Gonzales. "I wanted to tell my side of the story but nobody from the district wanted to talk to me or to my union rep."

What she didn't know was that district officials had decided to fire her. That, she learned weeks later, coming home from a previously scheduled trip to Walt Disney World with her husband and son to find an urgent phone message from her department chair, who couldn't understand why she had been asked to interview candidates for Gonzales' job.

"This temporary, summer position completely ruined everything," says Gonzales. "I lost the permanent position I loved. I was just thrown out on the street. My principal was as upset as I was. He said, 'I don't want to lose you, but there's nothing I can do.'"

There was, however, something that Gonzales could do with the help of her union. She filed a grievance under the terms of the contract, and an arbitrator heard the case that November. After a week of testimony, including the dramatic demonstrations of algebra skills by Gonzales' students, the hearing officer decided there had been no cheating and that the tangle of personal conflicts and miscommunications did not warrant firing a dedicated and effective teacher.

So Loretta Gonzales is back doing the work she loves, teaching mostly low-income Mexican-American students at a different but very similar high school--in fact, it's the school from which she graduated.

"Before this, I didn't see myself as active in the union," she says. "I was just happy being in the classroom. Now, I'm on the political action committee, the grievance committee, and the board of directors.

"You never know when something can happen to you. I was floating on cloud nine for eight years. The district loved me, the kids loved me, and boom! Out of the blue, one person can accuse you and ruin your life. But the union stuck with me. Had it not been for the union, my life would have been shattered.

"I'm so glad I'm still here--this is where my heart is."

Accusation: A two-hour lunch

Duane Exner is a school custodian in the small town of Nekoosa, Wisconsin. He's also the founder and a leader of the local education support professionals' union, and he's gotten used to the occasional unpleasant exchange with a school board member or administrator. So he wasn't really worried one July afternoon when a police officer who was also president of the school board asked him what he had been doing down by the river for two hours in the middle of the day.

"I told him I was there for half an hour at lunch and then went back to work," Exner recalls. "He said I wasn't being truthful. But it was ridiculous, so I just blew it off."

But this was to be no ordinary squabble.

Someone who ran a day care center had called the police to say a man was hanging around near the river across from her center. The officer drove over, recognized Exner, and went to see the day care provider. She thought Exner had been there for a couple of hours. Despite Exner's denial and although there was no record of Exner ever before being accused of violating working hours, he was fired for taking a two-hour lunch and lying about it on his timesheet.

"At first, I felt it was temporary--I didn't feel a whole lot until I came up to my home and my wife met me at the door," says Exner, remembering that day. "Then I felt bad. My wife has never worked outside the home and I am the sole income earner.

"When you apply for work, the job application asks for the reason you left your last employment. When you write 'terminated,' fat chance that someone's going to hire you. So you start to feel really worthless, having been labeled by this district as someone who is undesirable. You get up every morning facing nothing to do but sit around or maybe go out and apply for a job and put down, 'terminated.'"

Exner's colleagues helped him hold his head up. "I had tremendous support from the district employees, especially the teachers, who had several fund-raisers for me, which allowed us to maintain our dignity." The support professionals' union unanimously elected him president, a position he had left several years earlier.

Exner was also buoyed by his belief in the basic integrity of arbitrators. As a union leader, his experience had been that sometimes they want to split the difference between the two sides, but "when it's something as important as an individual's job, I have the greatest respect for them. This arbitrator was looking for the truth."

In finding witnesses who had seen him working that morning, Exner had to deal with the fear factor: Some people are afraid to cross their employer. But in the end, the evidence against him was uncertain and contradictory, while the testimony for him was clear and consistent. And Exner's faith in the arbitrator was well-founded.

What did he learn from the whole, horrible experience?

"Support your union. If you are in trouble, stand your ground, stand on your contract, that's why you have it. I wouldn't back off from these guys tomorrow. If they tried to violate the contract and it was going to cost me another 14 months of sitting around the house, I would challenge it. You've got to live with yourself."

Accusation: Revealing test items

Never in his life had James Hope been in trouble with the law. A husband, father, and teaching veteran of 17 years, he had been a model citizen--a man so adored at his Gwinnett County, Georgia, elementary school that he was once voted Teacher of the Year. Only problem, Hope had opinions. Strong ones. About kids, about how they learn, about what's fair.

And so three years ago, livid at the trauma his fourth graders were experiencing over the so-called Gateway exam--a $10 million high-stakes test thousands had flunked the year before--Hope bit the bullet and exposed some of its flaws.

On a Web site run by a concerned parents group, he anonymously posted six sample questions--ambiguous, poorly worded questions; questions covering material students had not been taught; questions--significantly--that would never again see the light of day because they had already been used.

It was not a move he took lightly. Hope says he was just plain sick at what he'd seen in his own classroom at Centreville Elementary, and knew the mental health of his students was at stake. "I had kids crying, they were so scared over this test," Hope says.

The irony, he notes, is that they had little to worry about: Countywide failure rates had been so high that officials had quietly, and dramatically, lowered the threshold for passing scores--23.7 percent for social studies and 33 percent for math.

Hope says he could not sit quietly in the face of this "mockery" of high standards. "I felt that putting young children through such unnecessary terror for the sake of a politically motivated, phony high standards movement was abusive."

High-stakes tests--and the Gateway in particular--were for the birds, he says.

In short order, James Hope became the renegade Georgia officials loved to hate. Convinced Hope had violated criminal and ethics laws, school district administrators and the Georgia Professional Standards Commission (PSC) dragged him through a legal ordeal that lasted three arduous years and nearly cost him his job.

First came the investigation by school district officials who wrongfully suspected Hope of stealing the exam and giving it to a local newspaper. Armed police went to his home and threatened jail time for him and his wife (who had typed the questions on the parent Web site). Police seized his phone records, ordered him to take a lie detector test, and interrogated his colleagues and friends.

Publicly humiliated when it was clear Hope was not a criminal, school officials sent the case to the PSC, which then accused the outspoken teacher of violating the state Code of Ethics. The PSC said Hope had no right to excerpt parts of the Gateway exam on the parent Web site and recommended his teaching certificate be revoked. An administrative law judge later ruled in favor of a six-month suspension.

In the end this aggressive prosecution failed. Swaddled at every step by General Counsel Terry Thomas and other advocates at the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE), and by a fervidly supportive public, Hope was vindicated. Thomas forcefully argued Hope's First Amendment protections and made it clear that the legal hounding he'd gotten appeared to be more of a "vendetta against his criticism of the exam than a sincere effort to punish any real ethics infraction."

To the delight of many who saw a classic tale of David versus Goliath, a Fulton County Superior Court judge last December cleared Hope of misconduct charges, ruling he should "be able to actively participate in the public debate regarding the test and share with the concerned parties the benefit of his hands-on experience with the students, the test and its administration." Today, parts of the Gateway exam have been ditched and a new statewide exam has taken centerstage.

Looking back, Hope says the ordeal was draining and at times frightening, but retreating never seemed an option. "From the beginning I knew what I did was the right thing to do," he says. "When they tried to run me out of town by threatening me with prison--that just got my blood up. I said I'm going to fight this all the way--and because I'm a member of GAE/NEA, that made it possible." His legal bills would have been over $30,000 had he used an outside attorney, he said, but he was spared financially because of the Association. "They were brilliant, and with me all the way.

"I tell you, it helped keep me sane."

Marilyn Milloy contributed to this report.

Fore more, read Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools, edited by ReLeah Cossett Lent and Gloria Pipkin, published by Heinemann, which includes a chapter by James Hope. And Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Greg Lawler, one of Loretta Gonzales' Colorado Education Association lawyers, which tells the stories of other educators he defended. It's published by New Forums Press.

What you can do...

...to avoid unfounded accusations

Colorado Education Association General Counsel Marti Houser tells new teachers, "The chances are that some time during your career, you or someone in your building will be falsely accused of child abuse or improper conduct with a student."

As these stories demonstrate, there is no guaranteed way to avoid such accusations. But there are ways to reduce your risk. Houser and other Association lawyers offer this advice:

If possible, avoid touching a student. That includes initiating hugs, especially with stu-dents in upper elementary grades or older.

You have a duty to try to keep students safe, which includes an obligation to break up a fight if you can. That of course may mean touching students. This is a dangerous situation both because you can get hurt and because a student may accuse you of hurting them. If possible, get help. Use the least force that will work, and immediately report what happened to your administration. "Breaking up a fight or trying to calm down a kid who's out of control--those are the most common situations in which teachers get accused of abuse," says Houser. "Sexual abuse charges are more likely to get headlines, but they're much more rare."

Try not to be alone with a student, especially not in an isolated location. Don't drive a student home, especially in the evening, unless the alternative is to leave the student stranded without transportation.

Avoid saying things or writing notes to a student that can be misinterpreted as personal or romantic. Avoid making off-the-cuff comments on a student's physical appearance or discussing personal topics that could be construed as sexual.

If a student confides in you on a personal topic of a sexual nature, tell the student you are not the one to talk to. Refer him or her to a counselor. "A lot of teachers feel they can be a student's confidant and help the student, but teachers are not trained for it and they should maintain some distance from students," says NEA Assistant General Counsel Michael Simpson. However, he notes that teachers in every state are "mandatory reporters," which means if a teacher has information indicating a student has been abused, the teacher is legally obligated to report it, not just to the school administration, but also to the local child welfare agency. Find out your district's policy on reporting comments about student suicide, pregnancy, or abortion to parents and to the administration.

If a student says he or she has a crush on you, make it clear that a romantic relationship would be wrong and is simply not possible. And notify your administration. Do not let flattery get the best of you.

Keep clear notes on any situation where you see the potential for future complaints.

...if you are accused

Colorado Education Association General Counsel Houser advises members, if they find themselves in a situation that could lead to a criminal accusation or to disciplinary action by their school district, to call their Association representative. Depending on the local, that person may be a building rep, the Association president, or a UniServ director.

Avoid going into a meeting about the situation alone, she says. "Say that you intend to cooperate but you want your Association representative present, or, if there are criminal charges, your lawyer."

Educators like to be helpful, Houser explains, but an innocent remark can land an educator in hot water. For example, a teacher might tell an administrator, "In hindsight, I wish I hadn't done such-and-such," with no intention of conceding actual wrong-doing. Such a comment can be twisted into what sounds like a confession. Better to have a knowledgeable witness to the conversation. However, Houser cautions that under some state laws, refusing to meet with the administration constitutes insubordination, so members should check.

What your Association can do for you

NEA members have the benefit of two programs protecting them against lawsuits and other attacks that involve their jobs:

• The Educators Employment Liability Program provides professional liability insurance up to $1 million for lawsuits. The same program also reimburses members for up to $35,000 for legal defense against criminal charges if they are exonerated.

• Under The Kate Frank/DuShane Unified Legal Services Program NEA splits with state Associations the cost of defending the job rights of members against actions by their employers.

Local Associations also defend members in less formal but highly effective ways. "Many people decide to join the Association because of the liability insurance," says Marti Houser. "And there's no question that professional liability insurance is important in today's litigious society. But for the majority of educators, the Association's day-to-day assistance on job-related problems that don't involve criminal charges is even more valuable." Most local Association presidents make great efforts to open the lines of communication with the administration and can often help resolve a dispute that otherwise might lead to litigation. And Association leaders and staff know how to use whatever due process and grievance procedures there are in each district.

In cases that do have the potential for criminal charges, Houser says, the UniServ office should be contacted right away.

What is fair treatment?

A parent calls the principal claiming a teacher has hit a child. Or a student claims a teacher is molesting him or her. What should the principal do?

By law the principal must report any case in which there is reason to think child abuse may have happened. The principal may fear being accused of negligence unless he or she takes action immediately. And nobody wants to keep an abusive person in the classroom.

But the cases reported in this issue of NEA Today are only a few of the many cases in which accusations are totally unfounded.

So there is no easy solution for an administrator caught in this position.

Often, the teacher is suspended, with or without pay, and given only a very general idea of why. This is wrong, says NEA's Michael Simpson. "Suspending a teacher accused of sexual abuse can destroy that person's reputation," he points out. "An educator should be told all the particulars of the accusation before any action is taken against him or her."

Without knowing the details, it may be impossible for the accused person to defend himself or herself, even if the charge is completely fabricated.

NEA works in legislatures and with school districts for laws and contracts that guarantee fairness. Unfortunately, current laws usually do not give an educator the right to know the accusation and the accuser before being suspended.

But Association staff and lawyers know the best ways to use the due process safeguards that do exist in each state and district.