The Washington Teachers’ Union suspended an official who is handling the bulk of the work from the recent mass firing of D.C. Public Schools teachers. “When you walked out of a meeting with me … it exemplified the fact that you have no interest in performing your duties as general vice president,” union President Nathan Saunders wrote in a memo suspending Candi Peterson without pay “for failure to perform the duties associated with your position.”
Peterson told The Washington Examiner that she walked out of a meeting with Saunders because he “verbally abused” her and spoke to her “like how you would talk to a dog.”
When Saunders asked to speak with her privately, Peterson said she declined, still reeling from the heated confrontation.
Saunders wrote that her refusal to discuss her walkout “is again evidence of your intention” to not do her job.
He stripped Peterson of her $150,000 salary and forbid her to work.
“I just dispute her allegation, and I don’t want to go into any depth,” Saunders told The Examiner.
He said he expects to resolve the issue quickly.
“This is the worst time for me to be gone,” Peterson said. “We have hundreds of people coming down here who just lost their jobs, and I’m over at that department that handles it. And they’ve crippled it even further by pushing me out.”
D.C. Public Schools fired 206 teachers on July 15 for poor performance on evaluations.
Saunders said, “I spend the vast majority of my time dealing with teacher terminations” and declined to comment further.
Saunders himself was the union’s vice president when then-President George Parker suspended him without pay last spring; the national American Federation of Teachers union ordered Saunders’ reinstatement in September. He did not receive back pay and decried his treatment to reporters.
Peterson said she is looking for a lawyer.
“We’re a union, we represent people, but here we are reprimanding someone without any type of progressive discipline, discussion, or dialogue,” she said. “We would fight against the very same thing if it happened to one of our members.”
