Straitjacket: Principals need more discretion in staffing

Henderson police have charged John Stalmach, a 31-year-old physical education teacher at Dailey Elementary School, along with his girlfriend, Brown Junior High English teacher Bambi Dewey, 32, of committing sex acts with a 16-year-old girl who attends Basic High School.

As a result, Stalmach is once again under scrutiny from the school district over allegations of improper conduct involving a different teenage girl in 2010.

In this month’s case, Stalmach and Dewey each were charged with solicitation of a minor for sex, a felony, although Nevada’s age of consent is 16 in most cases.

Whether a separate charge against Stalmach – sexual conduct between a teacher and a student – can be sustained will depend on whether Stalmach can be shown to have held a position of authority over the 16-year-old, who told Henderson investigators she drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and had three-way sex with the teachers at their home on Dec. 21 and later had sex with Stalmach alone.

State law prohibits a teacher, administrator, coach or volunteer from having sex with a student “enrolled in or attending the school at which the person is employed or volunteering.”

Time will tell how solid the criminal charges prove to be.

Of more concern, in some ways, is the news that the school district police investigation of the earlier, 2010 allegations against Stalmach – in which a student complained he had inappropriately shown her pictures of human genitalia in a health textbook – resulted in a 20-day suspension and his transfer from Basic to another school.

Given that no evidence of a crime was found at that time, school district officials say the suspension was the most severe punishment they could impose under the contract with the teachers union.

In fact, short of termination, that’s the harshest punishment administrators can impose for any offense.

Now, it’s possible for the pendulum to swing too far the other way. In imposing policies designed to block inappropriate behavior, care must be taken not to create some “zero tolerance” standard that could threaten the career of a perfectly well-meaning teacher or coach for, say, touching a student in a public gesture of encouragement, or for assigning classroom reading that may contain controversial passages.

But if employee contracts have become straitjackets that make it virtually impossible to dismiss people who don’t belong in the schools, they must be revised.

Principals and school district administrators must be granted precisely what bureaucracies and union contract negotiators dread – more authority to apply their mature judgment and common sense to each case as it arises.