The Return of Jeff Leardini
Posted May 30th, 2008 at 6:03 AM by Jeff A. TaylorBack in April 2006 Jeff Leardini was a teacher at Community House Middle School. Then five students accused him of touching them inappropriately. He quickly resigned and was later charged with sexual misconduct. A judge initially found him guilty of two counts of assault, but an appeal to a jury resulted in an acquittal on all charges in June 2007.
Now Leardini has filed suit against CMS seeking damages for how CMS administrators handled the incident. Specifically the suit charges that HR official Kay Cunningham falsely told Leardini that the district had a strict “no touch” policy and as a result he would be fired if he did not resign immediately. He was further told that if he resigned, he would be paid for the rest of the school year.
Turns out that was not exactly true. The following week the suit says Cunningham called to say she had made a mistake and Leardini would not get paid. When he said he intended to fight his termination in that case, Cunningham reversed course and CMS paid him.
Somehow I doubt this case makes it to open court.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Kids lie all of the time. I have started to doubt many of these so called “touching inappropriately” claims. Especially at the middle school level. I could easily see kids that age abusing the claim because they are smart enough to know how adults will overreact to it.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:26 am
And of course this will get settled out of court, for an amount that will probably consume the property tax contributions to CMS of several hundred Mecklenburg residents.
This is actually one of those times where having cameras and microphones installed in classrooms, wired to a recorder that catches everything, would be useful, so that we could determine exactly what did happen. Of course, then we’d have to have some idiotic panel to decide the retention policy for classroom recordings.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:34 am
That technology is cheap and disk storage is cheap. I think it might be a good idea.
Imagine how the atmosphere in classrooms might change if the kids and teachers knew that EVERYTHING is being recorded.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Quantum mechanics theory says that the mere act of observing an object causes its behavior to change. This is true on the micro scale (e.g., observing an atom by bouncing a photon off of it causes the atom to change position and/or velocity — see the Uncertainty Principle), and it’s true on the macro scale as long as the observed knows it’s being observed. In other words, tell someone they are being observed and they will change their behavior, even if only subtly. In some situations, this causes outrageous behavior… but in a school, if the students and teachers are aware that their actions may be under review, I think it would encourage a higher level of civility. At the very least, it would put an end to “he said/she said” situations in the classroom.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
They ought to require webcams in all the rooms where parents can sit in on the classes or periodically check up on the little darlings.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Skyler, I don’t know about that. We don’t need a system where random people can observe classrooms. Any such system would need to be off the Internet, with recordings stored for six months or a year before deletion is possible. (Obviously, only during school hours would anything need to be recorded.)
May 30th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Most daycare facilities offer webcam for the rooms. The parents have to register online and once confirmed, they are given the password for only the classrooms for their children.
This has been in both of the past two daycares we have had our children at.
It would be easy to do the same for regular classrooms. However, there is no audio.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:28 am
As a past student of Mr. Leardini, and close follower of the case from day 1 I would agree that some sort of classroom monitoring system would have been useful. However, it wouldn’t have mattered in this case because from day 1 it wasn’t taken care of properly. If the administration had followed procedures, it would never have been escalated to this level. IE: making the parents aware before the teacher resigned and the police were involved.
He was top literacy teacher in the state of NC, now he doesn’t teach, and the little girl got away with nothing but a finger shaken at her. The other 4 girls pulled out, only one stuck to the story. Although he was cleared, just google his name, he can’t teach again.
August 31st, 2008 at 10:49 am
If I ran a charter school, I’d hire him. My charter school would have such electronic monitoring for the protection of both teachers and students.
The NC General Assembly does not like this possibility.