Last December, Tyson Marsh and Olla Ibrahim, the father and mother of an eight-year-old boy attending Rising Star Elementary, a government school in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, began noticing worrisome changes in their son’s behavior.
Next, they discovered small bruises on his arm.
The boy, whose name is not being disclosed by the media because of his age, then told his parents that his teacher had hurt him. He started having trouble sleeping at night.
Though previously he had loved his teachers and his classes, he started telling Mr. Marsh and Ms. Ibrahim that he didn’t want to go to school.
On December 11, after hearing from his parents about the boy’s bruising, about his crying at night before sleeping, and about his repeated declarations that he did not want to go to school, principal Huyen Lam put special education teacher Ibijoke Idowu on administrative leave.
This June, a Seattle Public Schools investigation of Ms. Idowu concluded it was “more likely than not” that she had grabbed the autistic and partially verbal boy hard enough to cause his bruises.
By then, she had been installed as the president of the Seattle Education Association (SEA) teacher union, a subsidiary of the mammoth National Education Association (NEA) union.
In a statement furnished to Fox 13 News in Seattle, SEA officials made it clear they do not consider credible allegations of child abuse to be sufficient to disqualify a person from holding the union’s highest office.
National Right to Work Committee Vice President Matthew Leen commented that no one should be surprised that, although failure to fork over union dues does suffice to get you booted from the SEA presidency, a schoolchild’s reports to his parents that you physically abused him don’t.
“Given the long and ugly track record of NEA-affiliated union bosses’ aggressively protecting abusive teachers from termination,” he said, “why should other SEA officials care that three witnesses acknowledge having seen Ms. Idowu roughly ‘grab’ students, potentially leaving bruises?
“Indeed, acknowledging that she’s not entitled to keep her union job would make it more difficult for the SEA to continue insisting that other educators who are incompetent and/or cruel to children should stay in the classroom.
“Of course, most parents of school-aged children aren’t aware of the fact that teacher union bosses often use their government-granted monopoly bargaining privileges to shield accused child abusers, but when they learn about it they are appalled.”
Mr. Marsh expressed his profound dismay to a TV reporter in July: “I really question the agenda of the union . . . , particularly around how much they really do care about children as opposed to their own special interests.”
In a 2023 radio interview, Frank McCormick, who had for years been an educator in a unionized government school in forced-dues Illinois, offered an insider’s explanation as to why school districts find it so difficult to weed out abusers from their workforces.
Union bosses and the state labor laws that hand them monopoly-bargaining power are a big part of the problem, he said. And the education establishment’s failure to identify, punish and dismiss child abusers is “part of an overall larger culture of adults’ protecting a system that gives them a paycheck.”
Mr. McCormick personally learned just how little union officials in his own suburban Chicago district cared about keeping schoolchildren safe by observing how they dealt with allegations of gross misconduct by a fellow teacher and coach.
After the news broke that 50-60 female students had filed complaints about the coach’s inappropriate touching and demeaning comments, Mr. McCormick was appalled to hear the then-vice president of the union local spring to the coach’s defense, while insisting he was “misunderstood.”
“Government union bosses’ often successful efforts to appeal terminations of abusive school employees are one of an array of reasons the Committee regularly assists legislative efforts to scale down government-sector monopoly bargaining,” said Mr. Leen. “Just this year, the Committee helped get such laws adopted in Idaho and Iowa.”
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