Kennedy Veteran Teacher Unfairly Who Fought for Students Fired 

By John Heffernan

 My name is John Heffernan and I was a EBD/LD special education teacher for CPS for the last 15 years. The last 11 years I worked at Kennedy High School as a self contained and collaborative English, History, Math and Biology teacher. Until last year I was always rated superior or excellent. Once I started speaking up about the poor treatment the students (mainly special ed. kids and minority pupils) and teachers ( I testified for a colleague who was wrongfully terminated at a board of education dismissal hearing) were receiving at Kennedy High School, this principal started targeting me with very negative ratings, misconducts, excessive duties and contempt.

 

Not only was I forced to work in the worse room -309A (the smallest  in the school  and without windows), hardest population of special ed kids, but my classes would always be excessively  overloaded (15 kids when there is only supposed to be 8) beyond the state and federal legal limits.  I repeatedly asked for help and support from administrators and all they would do is ignore these requests or somehow try to blame me for any incidents that may have happened as a result of way too many students being in such a small space. Finally, I asked the union for help without filing a grievance. I believe this was filed in March, 2011.

CTU came to Kennedy, met with the principal and performed an audit of some of the special ed classes and found them to be overloaded.  Principal Szkapiak said he would look into this issue and that he really did not have money in the budget to hire more special ed. teachers. In that meeting, he told Union officials that ..." no doubt Mr. Heffernan has the hardest job in the school".

The next year he hired over 10 new special education teachers because of the ISBE complaints I filed.  After this meeting, Principal Szkapiak started treating me even worse than before. So I started filing  special education compliance complaints with Illinois State Board of Education, grievances with the union and helping all the students who were getting bullied and kicked out of the school.

In order to remove Kennedy's probationary status and raise test scores, Principal Szkapiak bullied, pressured, harassed and forced many minority "marginal" special and regular education students out of the school. He would dupe non-English speaking parents into signing English written documents, file false police charges against troublesome pupils, convince parents that maybe Kennedy H.S. was not the right place for their kids, remove students for excessive tardies, refuse to enroll special education students, have security assault these kids and then have them wrongfully arrested. If the parents signed the students out of school he would drop the charges.  He would even have Chicago Police department handcuff certain students for no  particular reason. He was out of control, and I and others wanted to take action against this bully administrator. He never seemed to get into trouble for anything. He is adept at manipulating others and blaming the accuser.

Soon thereafter every time he observed me I was given an unsatisfactory rating. This includes when I was given 5 minutes warning that he was going to do a formal observation right before a scheduled field trip and when he observed me in an illegally overcrowded room. The other lessons he observed were replicas of previously taught superior rated classes that some of his preferred teachers performed, yet on each one I did, he downgraded my rating.  Points were taken off of my observation for; students not being engaged, for room 309A needing a paint job, students whispering during the lesson, the room being cluttered, for a special education aide starting an argument during one of the lessons, for missing lesson plans that were previously handed in and for no community involvement even though I was constantly communicating with parents, teachers and  the community.  I was also downgraded because he said my lessons did not have enough "rigor" in them.  This lesson in particular was very challenging to these special education students even though many of these students had reading levels of 1st through 3rd grade.

On top of all this he has no special education experience, it was his first year of evaluating teachers, special education teachers had no curriculum to follow and it was a pilot year for these evaluations. He did not follow proper procedures, he gave me an E1 instead of an E3. Per the CTU contract,  I was never given any remediation program. I am one of the most tenured teachers at the school and on July 16, 2013, he leaves me a voice mail saying my position is no longer available to me.  Now I am out of a job from a school where I worked my tail off under very trying circumstances with an often hostile student and administrative presence.

Over the last couple of years Principal Szkapiak has dismissed other non-friendly teachers through devious  methods. This is why we are awaiting the results of an unfair labor practice filed against him by the CTU and a group of teachers at Kennedy.  Filing a grievance is a joke because ultimately it is a CPS employee that makes the final decision. Case in point, one of the grievances I filed was a blatant disregard of the CTU contractual rights (high school teachers should not have to teach 4 classes in a row.), and I lost that. 

My CTU rep Lois Jones says she feels strongly about these latest issues, but nothing ever happens in favor of the teacher. Supposedly these grievances are supposed to go into arbitration.

I think the principal is an ego-maniac, bully, control freak who gets insulted when anyone tries to tell him how to do his job, and then goes after such individual with a vengeance.

He did this because I filed a union advisory audit,  I testified against him at a former colleagues dismissal hearing, I filed special education compliance complaints against Kennedy High School, and I helped students who were being harassed by the administration and assaulted by Szkapiaks security guards.

I think the new contract  is a watered down version of the old one and has too many loopholes in it in favor of CPS.

CTU union rep Lois Jones says that this grievance is supposed to go into arbitration, but I have not heard anything yet.  I have videotaped copies of previously taught lessons that could work or I could teach a class in front of a neutral observer.