By Lucas Rivera

The Library Gulag
It takes a Village to send its teachers out to pasture.

The Children’s Village in Westchester is one of the nation’s largest residential treatment centers for troubled youth. Formerly an orphanage, the public school overlooks the Hudson from a sprawling, architectural-award-winning campus. Its 300 students are predominantly black and Latino children from the New York City area, many from broken homes and underprivileged families. The well-funded institution seems an unlikely battleground for one of New York State’s most bizarre and underreported labor conflicts.

Call them the teachers in exile. Their story dates back to March 1994, when the Children’s Village teacher’s union, seeking a small raise and a new contract for its members, picketed the school’s annual awards dinner at the Tarrytown Hilton. Ten teachers and aides were slapped with temporary restraining orders and found guilty of contempt of court. A protest three months later outside the offices of superintendent Sandra Mallah’s office resulted in a second batch of teachers and aides getting axed or suspended, bringing the tally up to 23 instructors driven from their classrooms. Mallah at the time labeled them a mob and barred them from the school grounds. After nine years, a spate of lawsuits and an estimated $13 million spent by the school in salaries, legal fees and settlements (according to the union), she’s clung to her word.

And this is where things get odd. Because the administration couldn’t fire the tenured teachers, the school instead suspended them with pay and benefits and scattered them throughout libraries in the New York area. Union officials claim that the Greenburgh 11 school district, where Children’s Village is located, has been waging a multimillion-dollar campaign to crush their union–all financed by New York taxpayers.

David Demnitz is one of four "phantom teachers" who remain tucked away in solitude within the glass-encased confines of reference rooms and book stacks. Until recently the former music teacher wrote lesson plans at the Iona College library and e-mailed them to his superiors at Children’s Village 12 miles away, who then allegedly tossed the plans into a cabinet, never to see the light of day. A tallish fellow dressed in a charcoal tweed jacket and black jeans, with salt-and-peppery hair, Demnitz still looks and dresses the part of music teacher. But he’s growing impatient waiting for his day in court. "I always thought my suspension would be very brief," says Demnitz. "I can’t believe they’re discussing whether I’m fit to be a teacher because I went to a demonstration."

Until then, Demnitz clocks in at 8:35 every morning and works a full day at Iona’s library. At one point Children’s Village actually hired "spies" to monitor the teachers, who were reported to the school’s administration if caught reading newspapers or otherwise shirking their absentee duties. Lesson plans written in exile have not been up to Children’s Village "standards," resulting in more than 2500 gratuitous disciplinary charges against teachers like Demnitz.

The dispersed Village teachers liken the experience to being in prison. "The biggest thing that bothers me is the isolation," whispers Debbie Kiely, a teacher in her late 50s who works in the Ossining Public Library. "When a prisoner reacts poorly…they put them in solitary confinement. And that’s what they’ve done with us."

Reginald Skinner works eight hours a day in the Mount St. Vincent’s library in wooden chairs so uncomfortable that he’s had to see a doctor. A Vietnam vet and no stranger to isolation, Skinner resents feeling cut off from his academic peers. "It really is an exile," he says. "They don’t want us to communicate with anyone else. I think they wanted people to drop out or leave so they wouldn’t have to resolve the [union] issue."

But why haven’t the state administrative agencies and local Board of Education been more active throughout the negotiations? The answer depends on whom you ask. John Goetschius, who taught 31 years before being suspended, says attempts to notify and involve city officials have gone nowhere. At the local level, Goetschius accuses the district’s board of unethical behavior. In the late 90s, then-comptroller H. Carl McCall launched an investigation of the Greenburgh 11 district’s legal spending that resulted in mild criticism but no intervention. Not a shocker, say union officials. After all, they claim, McCall received a $14,000 political contribution for his gubernatorial bid from Sheldon Mallah, husband of Superintendent Mallah and a top member of the Greenburgh 11 Board.

"While they claim they are an independent entity," says Conrad Lower, the teachers union’s attorney, "on all fronts we have shown that the Board of Education is made up of non-elected [officials] appointed by Children’s Village." The school district has also doled out legal fees to the law firms of lawyers who sit, or once sat, on the board, say union officials. Goetschius tried to reform the school district by placing an independent public advocate to serve as a watchdog. "We were trying to change the situation...and get people who were independent at the school," he explains. "We wanted to get some residents in the community who were not appointed by the board."

For now, the two sides remain tangled in legal limbo. Despite the fact that the initial disciplinary charges have been thrown out of court, the case against the four remaining castaway teachers slogs on. They remain suspended (some because of the poor lesson plans they’ve submitted). Meanwhile, Children’s Village expenses rise even as school funding is cut. The school, with an annual budget of $16 million, has reportedly used taxpayers’ dollars for everything from bomb-sniffing dogs to bodyguards for the superintendent. At least now the district is required to report all its legal expenditures, says Jonathan Berman, a spokesman with New York State Education Department.

A handful of teachers, including Hedwig Broetz, have won settlements and returned to work. A native of Germany, Broetz remembers an administration at Children’s Village less concerned with educating students than busting unions. "When I asked the administration about the curriculum," she says, "they said there was none. You teach whatever you want. They didn’t seem to care about anything."

Idi Peterson is a former student at Children’s Village and one of the school’s success stories. Now a financial consultant, he remembers Ms. Broetz fondly, but says the union dispute cast a pall over his time at the school. He says the money spent on union busting could’ve been used to improve services and buy books. "Back then, we really needed them. This hurt everybody. It hurt the kids. It also hurt Children’s Village," he says. "Of course they couldn’t tell the students what was going on, because then you would have students rallying against the administration."

Life goes on for the teachers in exile. Demnitz recently filed a complaint with the Bloomberg administration but has heard nothing. He, like the three others, dreams one day of reentering the classroom.

"I have been surprised, amazed and dismayed," he says. "The reason I’ve hung in there is because I know I’m doing the right thing. There is no way any conscientious individual can possibly consider that what this school is doing isn’t wrong."