By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

CHERRY HILL, N.J. – The latest “Teachers Behaving Badly” story has surfaced in a New Jersey elementary school.
    
According to media reports, Stuart Chaifetz wanted to find out if his 10-year-old autistic son was guilty of “violent outbursts” like his teacher was claiming. The father thought the charges were out of character for his son, whom he describes as “sweet and non-violent.”
    
Chaifetz rigged up a recording device that captured audio of what was really going on in his son’s classroom. The recordings, which are available on YouTube, revealed the teacher and a classroom aide “joking about their alcohol abuse and sex lives in front of their students – all of whom suffer from conditions that prevent them for relaying the conversations to their parents,” reports the Huffington Post.
    
The recordings capture aide Jodi Sgouros and teacher Kelly Altenburg speaking harshly to Chaifetz’s son, Akian.
    
“Oh Akian, you are a bastard,” Sgouros allegedly said in one of the recordings.
    
Chaifetz said he decided to make the recordings public after school officials failed to act decisively.
    
” … [T]o say you have downplayed what happened would be generous … I was asked to trust that you would do the right thing and I was promised this would not be swept under the rug,” Chaifetz wrote in an email to Cherry Hill Public Schools Superintendent Maureen Reusche, reports Collingswood.Patch.com.
    
The aide has been fired, but the teacher remains employed by the school district, reports the Huffington Post.
    
If the New Jersey school district decides to fire Altenburg, it could take two to five years before she is no longer on the district’s payroll, as EAGnews documented in an exclusive chart.
    
This case – in which a 10-year-old special needs student is allegedly traumatized by an abusive teacher, who is allowed to keep teaching – might well be proof that tenure violates human rights, but not in the way union leaders claim.