Posted on 04/28/2011 7:05:18 AM PDT by TheDingoAteMyBaby
An upper-crust private school with campuses in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton is facing eight age-discrimination complaints filed by longtime teachers, assistants and a maintenance worker.
“It’s an elder massacre,” said labor attorney William Amlong, who filed the complaints against Pine Crest School on behalf of the three men and five women, ranging from 54 to 72 years old. “Most of them are long-term employees, none of them have any performance problems that have been brought to their attention and they were all summarily told, ‘You’re out of here.’ ”
According to the complaints filed during the past two months with the Florida Commission on Human Relations and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a number of Pine Crest employees have been told they don’t “fit the vision” of the school’s new president and have been fired or told their contracts will not be renewed at year’s end.
An attorney for the school declined to comment Wednesday. “At this point in time, all I can say is I’m not authorized to give you any kind of statement on behalf of the school,” attorney Suzanne Bogdan told the Sun Sentinel.
Founded in 1934, Pine Crest commands annual tuitions of up to nearly $24,000. It has more than 200 faculty members and 2,500 students from preschool through 12th grade.
Henry M. Battle Jr. began his tenure as the school’s fourth president on Feb. 1. Before joining Pine Crest, Battle was headmaster of the Forsyth Country Day School near Winston-Salem, N.C.
Walter L. Banks, chairman of the board of Pine Crest School, said Battle “is coming in and making changes at the school.”
‘it was time’
Battle took over from Lourdes Cowgill, who led Pine Crest for more than 15 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
Welcome to private education.
You have to attract new members every year. Therefore your faculty needs to be attractive to the young, rich, attractive clients.
Add that to the extrodinary administrative turnover in most private schools and you don’t have much of a shot if your over 50.
Longevity is not a word often associated with anything in private, non-parochial schools.
I would bet it is money related. After reaching the age of 40, health insurance and disability insurance is pretty high. That is where the older people really get hurt.
That’s interesting. My experience has mostly been in religious private schools, but the school in this article is non-sectarian. I had a good deal of teachers who had 15-20 years in their positions and just assumed that was normal. How else are parochial and private schools different?
My children were in a private pre through first grade school about 15 years ago. They hired an 82 y.o. to teach cooking and sewing.
Last week I read an article about her - she’s still there at 97 teaching two full days a week!
Wall Street Journal article about headmaster pay for private schools - cached at Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2229176972&topic=1982
Its headmaster, Henry M. Battle Jr., received more than $300,000 in salary and bonuses in 2004-05, according to the school’s most recently available tax filings. That’s nearly double the national median salary for private-school chiefs — and above the pay at names like New York’s Dalton and Connecticut’s Choate Rosemary Hall.
And the ragged son of a beotch is willing to put long time employees on the street because they don’t fit his “VISION”
I admit I have no evidence except for my own experiences in private education.
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