Freeport Faculty, Parents, Students Protest Transfer Of Teacher, Assistant Principal

FREEPORT, NY. — Carrying signs that read, "Transparency builds trust — try it!" and more, parents, teachers and students marched in the cold outside the Freeport School District Wednesday, objecting to recent conduct of the Freeport Board of Education that they said was marked by a lack of transparency, a culture of intimidation — and the transfer of a senior teacher.

For the duration of the two-hour protest, many cars traveling along Seaman Avenue, Ocean Avenue and Lincoln Place honked their horns in support of the protesters. Signs carried at the protest also read, “Can you read this? You’re welcome!” One protester even invoked Dr. Seuss’s character, The Lorax, carrying a sign that read, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not!”

Protesters walked laps along the sidewalk in front of the administrative offices, heading from the entrance down to the corner of Ocean Avenue and Lincoln Place, halfway down Lincoln Place, then back up Ocean Avenue before rounding the corner onto Seaman Avenue and repeating the process. All the while, chants from the protesters included, “What do we want? Respect! When do we want it? Now!” As well as “Stop targeting teachers” and “Put our students first!”

“Right now we’re here because of the community; to support the community of Freeport, the parents, the students as well as the teachers,” faculty member Chris Dressler said. “We feel that, due to the lack of transparency and leadership in the district, we’re not doing what’s best for our students, we’re not doing what’s best for our parents and we’re not doing what’s best for our teachers.”

The teacher transferred was Patty Langan, president of the Freeport Teachers’ Association and a 32-year veteran of the district. Langan was transferred out of the high school, where she taught five classes including a co-taught class that instructs both general education students and students with individualized education plans (IEPs) to Dodd Middle School.

When asked why the district transferred Langan, Dressler said: “The explanation given was that it was due to an unfounded harassment claim. So, the initial explanation was, ‘served the best needs of the district.’ There’s no way you could say that’s serving the best needs of the district. So they said that there was an inconclusive, unfounded harassment claim. That the harassment claim itself was not founded.”

When reached for comment, district communications representative Ron Edelson disputed the assertion that the claim was unfounded. Edelson said the district is limited in what it can say about the transfer due to personnel matter regulations, but said the claims were legitimate enough to necessitate the transfer of Langan out of the high school.

“There are circumstances that occurred having to do with situations that arose that involved her that warranted an investigation. That’s all the district can say about that, because it’s a personnel issue, but based on those circumstances and what that investigation showed, they went to her and said they were going to be transferring her to the middle school,” Edelson said Friday.

Langan, “was given notice on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, that she was now being reassigned and transferred to Dodd Middle School,” Dressler said. “Her assignment at Dodd Middle School is shadowing a teacher, from now until January. 32 years of experience, she’s now shadowing a teacher in the middle school.”

District officials confirmed that Langan had received notice of the transfer the day before Thanksgiving, but neither confirmed nor denied the time she was notified. The district also said that the timing of the notice was to give Langan time to process and prepare for the change. Patch asked if the timing of transfer was motivated by a desire to allow tempers to cool over the holiday weekend, an idea that the district denied.

“Nothing was going to 'blow over,' per se. Was Patty going to be happy with this? Obviously not. Were those teachers that supported her going to be happy with this? Obviously not, based on what you heard on Wednesday,” Edelson said. “So there was no thought that anything was going to ‘blow over,’ they didn’t want to tell her one day and have her have to move over on the next day, which would be really unsettling…It allowed space between learning you’re going to start at a new school and starting at a new school. Some people say, ‘Yeah, but it was a holiday. Why would you do it over a holiday?' I can’t answer that. You can look at it both ways, this is how the district looked at it. Rather than telling her one day and having her start the next day, if we could do it this way and we knew the holiday was coming, tell her before the holiday so she has the holiday time to process it, get ready and report to the middle school ready to work.”

As for the “shadowing” designation, the district’s communications official said Langan is in-class at the middle school with a plan in place for her to take on classes after December recess.

“She will be teaching five classes at the middle school. She’s going to be teaching a course that she hasn’t taught before at the middle school; you don’t throw someone into that situation without making sure they feel comfortable with that situation,” the district’s representative said. “So, rather than ‘shadowing,’ she’s in the classroom with the teacher who’s currently teaching those classes, sharing the classroom with that teacher, learning what the curriculum is, meeting the students and allowing the students to meet her. She’s in that classroom every day, because, come Jan. 5, those students are all hers.”

Langan did not respond to requests to comment for this story.

Also subject to objection from protesters Wednesday was the transfer of an assistant principal, which protesters said was involuntary and came the same week as Langan’s transfer to Dodd.

“Earlier that week, they took one of the assistant principals from the high school to fill a hole, an involuntary transfer. So she did not want to go,” Dawn De La Llera, a parent with one son who graduated from Freeport and a daughter in pre-k in the district, said. “She was the class lead for, I think, the class of 2027. And they took her out on Friday afternoon and said Monday, you're going to the elementary school. But they won't hire anybody.”

De La Llera was one of several parents at the protest who raised concerns about the district’s transparency, both in Langan’s transfer, the assistant principal’s transfer, and other personnel proceedings throughout the spring.

“We've been very involved parents for many years. I did PTA in all of the schools, been working with the staff, I go to the board meetings, we've been asking questions,and they have either been denying us the right to speak, not answering our questions, turning off the microphone, shutting the meetings down, will not even, nothing. And it's all public record. It's all on video, where they will not answer a single question,” De La Llera said.

Edelson said the transfer of the assistant principal was motivated not by punishment. Instead, the communications staffer said the assistant principal was chosen to fill a vacant role in the elementary school.

“She speaks Spanish, the elementary school that she was sent to to fill that [Assistant Principal] position is over 70 percent Hispanic, Spanish-speaking population. So it made sense, she was the best person to send at this point in time to fill that vacant [Assistant Principal] position,” Edelson said.

When asked if he felt the district had a transparency problem, Edelson said the district was being as transparent as it could be, under the circumstances.

“If [parents and faculty] want to know exactly why [the district] took the action that they did with Ms. Langan, they can’t talk about that unless they are being given permission to talk about it. They are being as transparent as they can be on that," Edelson said.

Edelson said both faculty members are being paid at the same rate that they were before the transfers. When asked if there was any record of prior disciplinary action against Langan before her transfer, Edelson said the district couldn’t comment.

When asked what they hoped would change in the wake of the protest, answers varied throughout the group.

“We’re hoping that, in order to better serve the students, in order to better reach the students, that there’s more transparency in the leadership, that there’s someone that is going to be willing to take the reins of this district and actually lead us, help us, assist us and that we no longer live in fear of retaliation when speaking out,” Dressler said.

For Rick, a Freeport sophomore, the hope coming out of Wednesday’s protest was for "some respect for the teachers. Let them be heard; it’s what they deserve.”

After roughly an hour of marching back and forth, Langan and Dressler entered the school building for a meeting with the district. Dressler said the meeting was over a teachers' association grievance, unrelated to Langan’s transfer.

As the duo entered, the protesters outside chanted, “Patty! Patty! Patty!