Officials' Silence Puts Parents 'at Arm's Length'

Schools nationwide are calling on parents to get involved. The Maryland State Board of Education endorsed a broad range of family outreach initiatives in a 2005 report that called public education "a shared responsibility."

Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.

Dawn Mosisa said she found an information void when she tried to follow up on her daughter's story about a teacher who allegedly hit another second-grader at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville. Likewise, scores of parents at Lakewood Elementary School, also in Rockville, said they had a hard time finding out why a teacher they considered top-notch was recommended for dismissal. They also felt their input was ignored.

School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.

"As parents of children enrolled in the public school system, it seems that we're informed about issues that affect our children in one of three ways: too late, too little or not at all," said Tonye Gray of Wilmington, N.C., who is editor of the Public School Parent's Network Web site at http://www.psparents.net. "It's as if there is an unspoken, unwritten code of silence keeping us at arm's length from being true participants in our children's education."

Andy Plattner, chairman of KSA-Plus Communications in Arlington County, who advises school systems on communicating with parents, said there are legitimate legal obstacles to disclosure in many personnel-related situations. But he said that "parents should have access to information" and that administrators should seek ways to make that happen.

A Washington Post review of several local incidents in recent years and interviews with experts found that disputes over parental access to personnel-related information occur with some regularity in Virginia, the District and Maryland, although there are no reliable data on how often parents are kept in the dark and what harm, if any, the secrecy causes.

Exactly what Mosisa's daughter witnessed at Maryvale Elementary in spring 2003 remains unclear because the school's and teacher's versions of events are unavailable. But Mosisa said her daughter reported one day that her second-grade teacher in the French immersion program had ordered the class to count to 10 in French while he hit a boy 10 times with a ruler.

The girl was not in the habit of making up stories, Mosisa said. But like most parents, Mosisa did not want to think an educator would be so cruel. She heard nothing about the incident from the school, so she assumed her daughter's story was not true.

But several months later, Mosisa heard that the teacher had left the school following other allegations of physical and verbal abuse. She and other parents said they then urged the principal to tell what he knew about the teacher and the complaints. Mosisa said her daughter was so traumatized by what had happened that she was afraid to ask her third-grade teacher questions about homework.

The principal at the time, Eric Davis, replied that the teacher no longer worked at the school but gave no further information.

Montgomery school officials told The Post that the teacher no longer works for the county system.

In an interview, Davis said complaints about the teacher were part of an evaluation that would be made available to officials of any school thinking of hiring him. Davis later added, through a spokesman, that he directly addressed questions about the teacher raised by individual parents and that most were satisfied with how the situation was handled. Mosisa was not.

Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), chairman of the state Senate's Judicial Proceedings Committee, said school officials should be able to tell parents what happened to their children.

Said Howie Schaffer, a spokesman for the District-based Public Education Network: "School boards often use inaccurate interpretations of privacy laws and confidentiality agreements to conduct important school business out of the public eye."

But Montgomery schools spokesman Brian Edwards and other county schools officials said state law prevents public disclosure of sensitive personnel information, including reports on investigations of complaints.

At Lakewood Elementary, parents faced a different challenge: finding out what was happening with a teacher they considered a star. But the result was the same. Parents said they felt shut out.

Third-grade teacher Soon-Ja Kim retired in 2006 after being recommended for dismissal, according to Kim and others familiar with her case. The recommendation stunned many parents who believed their children had thrived in her class. More than 100 families had written letters on Kim's behalf. Parents told school officials that Kim, who had 20 years of classroom experience, was "a phenomenal role model" and "in a peerless category" and had "enhanced confidence, self-esteem and motivation" in her students.

Those letters were put into Kim's case file and later reviewed by The Post.

But a panel of eight teachers and eight principals charged with reviewing Kim's performance gave little weight to the parent letters when they considered her future in a closed-door meeting, according to panel members.

Doug Prouty, vice president of the Montgomery County Education Association and co-chairman of the panel, said in an interview that the strong parental support for Kim was considered only a "secondary data source."

The good test scores of Kim's students, he said, were also secondary. The primary sources for the decisions, he said, were the judgments of Principal Elaine Chang, a consulting teacher assigned to evaluate Kim and the panel members themselves that Kim was ineffective in the classroom and hurting her students' progress.

"That's a bunch of hooey," said Elyse Summers, one of the multitude of pro-Kim parents. "Our children went to Mrs. Kim's class every day, came home and are performing extremely well."

"We take parent feedback, both good and bad, about teachers very seriously," Edwards replied. But the Montgomery schools spokesman added that "the final decision about the effectiveness of teachers must come down to those with the professional expertise."