Bedbugs, lounge chairs and ‘absolutely nothing’ to do: Tales from inside Philly schools’ rubber room

By one administrator’s count, the Philadelphia School District spent about $225,000 paying him not to work for a year and a half.

The school administrator spent weekdays in a “rubber room,” a space at the district’s North Broad Street headquarters where the school system sends employees accused of wrongdoing while their cases are investigated, sometimes for years.

Eventually, the administrator, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal, was exonerated. But not before he spent a full school year, plus parts of two others, in “reassignment,” paid his full salary to do “absolutely nothing.”

It was a completely surreal experience, he said. With no direction and rarely a sighting of any supervisors, the dozens of people assigned to a series of windowless conference rooms found ways to cope: Some would clock in and read, then leave to have a meal, go to the gym, or explore the city, then return to clock out.

“If you were to walk by some of these rooms, it’s almost comical what you’d see — if the group gels enough, sometimes they’ll have parties,” the administrator said. “It’s a huge waste of money. Some people bring lounge chairs and fall asleep.”

Isaiah Thomas, chair of City Council’s education committee, is demanding answers. At Thomas’ behest, Council voted last Thursday to hold hearings on the district’s rubber rooms. No date has been set.

A district spokesperson said the system was “actively working” to fix the rubber room issues. Last week officials said that 66 people are currently in reassignment status. They would not say whether that number included only teachers or other job categories.

“We look forward to collaboratively meeting with our labor partners and elected officials to discuss solutions that help streamline processes that better support our students and schools,” Christina Clark, the spokesperson, said in a statement.

Kelley Collings, a longtime district teacher, called the rubber room — where she spent nine days in October — “an alternate reality.”

Collings showed up in the rubber room on a Monday after a student at Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences accused her of striking him — a charge that was proved unfounded. Collings never received any instruction about what she should be doing while in reassignment, she said.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding me? There’s no one in charge?’ It was the other people who took care of me,” Collings said. “People clock in and leave.”

For the first few days, Collings remained in the room and read. Then someone told her a nearby gym was offering free trial memberships, so she took some yoga classes. She set up lunch dates. Her rubber room stint fell over Halloween, and some people dressed up in prison uniform costumes.

Collings quickly learned about the informal code of the rooms.

“It’s like being in jail; it’s a culture in and of itself,” Collings said. People who have been there the longest — three years is the record, as far as Collings knows — got the best seats. There is fierce competition for chairs near electrical outlets, and deals are made over access to extension cords.

Collings’ said her short stint in the rubber room was an outlier, made possible “because I pulled every political string and used every ounce of political and relational capital I had,” she said. She and other district employees who spent time in the rubber room say that while people accused of serious wrongdoing should absolutely not be around children, the system needs to be reformed. Some students know they could make their teachers go away with false accusations, too, she said.

“There has to be a way for us to protect kids, but also protect the integrity of our profession,” Collings said.

Both Collings and the administrator bristled at having no school-related work to do while in the rubber room. The administrator managed to get his boss to allow him to do some remote work — he checked lesson plans and created slides for teachers.

But that was perhaps an hour’s worth of work per week. Another teacher, who has been in the rubber room for two years, has spent his time visiting libraries, studying language, playing music, and completing the work necessary to re-up his National Board Certification, a prestigious qualification program some teachers opt into.

To celebrate one person’s imminent release from the rubber room, some staffers recently went to listen to a Wanamaker Organ performance.

But while there are moments of levity, each of the six people The Inquirer spoke to said the rubber room was dehumanizing, a place sometimes so dispiriting that people wept.

“It’s labor relations’ practice to make it as hard as possible on every individual that goes there,” the teacher who studied for his National Board Certification said. “You’re treated poorly and with negligence.”

One school staffer who has been assigned to the rubber room since October has spent only two weeks there.

“They treat you like trash there,” said the employee, who asked not to be identified because her case is ongoing. “It made me so physically ill to be there, I’m using my sick days to avoid going to teacher jail.”

On one day, the employee said, a labor relations staffer came into one room and announced to those present: “I fired five people today.” She said the entire experience “feels like a bad movie,” and she desperately wants to get back to her school and her students, whom she loves.

Oz Hill, the district’s interim deputy superintendent of operations, has recently begun to institute some changes: He set up a listening session with people assigned to the rubber room, ordered the room cleared of bedbugs, and promised to streamline operations.

But change has been slow to come, those inside say.

To the administrator, it is especially galling that an under-resourced school district is wasting so much money on the rubber room. He was in the room for nine months before there were any hearings or movement in his case, and that came only after he contacted multiple authorities himself, including the district’s inspector general.

Many cases are complicated, with various authorities involved, but many people are cleared by agencies like the city’s Department of Human Services and then still remain in the rubber room while their cases languish at the district level.

“The bulk of the people, if investigations were done quickly and thoroughly, they wouldn’t be there longer than two weeks,” the administrator said. His $225,000 back-of-the-envelope calculation was just for his salary, but doesn’t include money spent on any professionals paid to cover his work, or the outside law firm eventually hired to investigate his case.

“We have a shortage of people, of teachers, and you hear every single year there’s always a shortage of monies,” the administrator said. “But you have millions of dollars every single year in those rooms.”