Were your teachers like this?
Lauderhill teacher faces firing for sexual harassment
By Jamie Malernee,
www.sun-sentinel.com
Broward School Board members will decide today whether to fire a male teacher accused of sexually harassing a female colleague and preaching to school employees that a woman's proper role is to serve men and have their babies.
Social studies teacher Paul Mocombe, 28, was suspended from Lauderhill Middle School in the fall after allegations that he humiliated teachers at the school, commenting on their weight and physical attributes and, in one case, cornering a teacher in her classroom and refusing to leave until she kissed him. He also was accused of throwing a pen at a student while engaging in "horseplay."
Mocombe, hired in 1997, said on Monday that the complaints have been "blown out of proportion" and that the teacher he is accused of harassing "more or less set me up."
"I made jokes. Some people are offended by my religious and political views," he said. "It was foolishness. All of this has nothing to do with students."
But after hearing both sides of the case, Administrative Law Judge Florence Snyder Rivas has not only recommended Mocombe's termination, but harshly rebuked the school's principal, Phillip Patton, for failing to rein the teacher in sooner.
"Lauderhill [Middle] was an ideal environment for Mocombe," the judge wrote in her order. "The atmosphere at the school is sexually charged to an extent inappropriate to the serious business of teaching children who are at a fragile stage of their own sexual development."
Rivas ruled March 14 that:
He openly practiced "hedonism," despite being married with children, having an affair with one Lauderhill teacher and pursuing another despite her repeated complaints that he was harassing her.
He was known for a "constant stream of crude references to sex;" he routinely referred to women as "b*****s and whores;" and at one point he stood up in a room to show how one teacher had gotten him sexually excited.
He mocked organized religion and people of faith, saying he was going to start his own church, call himself Prophet Paul and require all women who wanted membership to have his baby.