New charges by teachers suggest that Jose Maldonado-Rivera — the prin cipal of the school that drowning victim Nicole Suriel, 12, attended — was a disaster waiting to happen.
If those allegations prove true, he should have been fired long before he let Nicole and her classmates go on that fatal, shockingly ill-planned field trip to the beach last month.
Instead, his tenure at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering was allowed to take effect after the accident, though he faces a two-year probation.
It’s downright scary.
The tragic death of the sixth-grader — and the risks to which her classmates were exposed — should have been enough by themselves to earn Maldonado-Rivera his walking papers.
A damning report by the Department of Education blasted the lax supervision during the outing to Long Beach. It cited an insufficient number of chaperones and said that students, even those who couldn’t swim, were allowed into the choppy surf — despite a sign stating that no lifeguards were on duty.
Parents had never gotten permission slips to sign.
It’s beyond comprehension that a principal could have allowed such an outing.
But this tragedy may have been merely the inevitable result of a pattern of safety lapses. That, at least, is what some teachers at the school are claiming. They
call the bungling “symptomatic of the attitude” at the school.
The teachers, for example, say that limits on how many kids could take part in a course involving dangerous equipment, like power tools and box-cutters, have been ignored.
They cite too-few chaperones assigned to a trip to Puerto Rico.
One teacher said she left the school to avoid the many required field trips: “I always thought something could happen,” Dana Ligocki told The New York Times. “I never imagined it being this awful.”
Save for one teacher, no one filed official protests until after the drowning.
And, to be sure, much of the long-simmering tensions between Maldonado-Rivera and his staff may stem from their complaints that he wants them to work longer hours without extra pay. That may be one reason the school has produced stellar academic results — and why parents reportedly continue to back the principal and want him to stay.
Still, the teachers’ allegations surely deserve investigation. Even if they prove unfounded, the punishment meted out — probation for Maldonado-Rivera, a demotion for an assistant principal and the firing of a teacher — seems entirely too light, given that a child needlessly died and others were put at grave risk.
School officials yesterday said they forwarded the new complaints to the special commissioner of investigation. Good.
For the sake of future students, officials need to probe this thoroughly.
And swiftly.