Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Peter Panse Trial Ends

Remember the case of Peter Panse, the upstate New York art teacher suspended over drawing classes, nudes and a ton of other allegations?

Well... The Times-Herald Recond reports that

A year, half a dozen days of testimony, and untold amounts of taxpayers' money later, Middletown High School art teacher Peter Panse gets a 15-day suspension without pay and will return to the classroom by mid-February.

School district officials sought to fire Panse, who has tenure, accusing him of bringing sex into his high school classroom and violating district policy by offering students a figures drawing class — which would include the use of nude models — off campus and for his profit.

An administrative law judge who heard testimony over the course of four sporadic months ruled Jan. 8 that Panse did violate the no-solicitation policy, but that the district failed to prove the teacher's talk of nude-model drawing rose to the level of sexual inappropriateness. In his ruling, Joel M. Douglas found that the testimony of some of the district's key witnesses was "evasive, vague and ambiguous."
Read the whole story here.

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