San Diego-Area Educators Oppose Rogers Being Forced Out of Job

Without evidence of an imminent safety risk to students, San Diego-area educators say they would not have asked the wife of Vincennes skipper Will Rogers III to resign her fourth-grade classroom duties at a private school just because she may have been the target of a terrorist attack last week.

Instead, educators interviewed by The Times said they would have made sure that the government provided extra security for Sharon Rogers’ class or would have transferred the teacher to another assignment, where she could keep working but have minimal contact with students until any threat had subsided.

Several superintendents pointed out Friday that unlike private school administrators, state law forbids them to remove a teacher from the classroom for reasons other than insubordination or incompetence.

Aside from the law, however, several superintendents said they would have moral qualms about letting Rogers go.

On Thursday Rogers resigned her elementary school teaching duties at the exclusive La Jolla Country Day School, where she was employed for 12 years and earned a reputation as an excellent educator.

The move came six days after Rogers escaped injury when a crude pipe bomb exploded under the Toyota van she was driving to school. Experts believe the bombing could have been a terrorist retaliation for the accidental downing of an Iranian airliner by the Vincennes last summer.

The van bombing followed by two days a bomb threat phoned into the La Jolla campus, which this week employed security guards to turn away strangers and search classrooms before the start of school.

In announcing the “mutual decision” for Rogers to step down, officials at the private school said they were concerned about the “safety of the children, the confidence of the parents and the integrity of the educational environment.”

Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego), a friend of the Rogerses, said Friday that he was deeply disappointed in the school’s decision to drop Sharon Rogers from the faculty. He said he believed that Rogers, already victimized by the van explosion, was being made a victim a second time by losing her job.

“As the father of three kids, I can certainly identify with the concerns of the parents,” he said. “But this is a case where the victim is a victim again.

“And this is what international terrorism is all about, to put such fears into how we go about our daily business that we capitulate.”

A number of San Diego-area educators said their guidelines and “moral” feelings were such that unsubstantiated fears about a terrorist attack on campus would not be strong enough to keep Rogers out of their classrooms.

‘Sense of Direction’

“In this day and age, we have to deal with a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity, and one of the things we have to do is provide some sense of direction for our young people on how to deal with that,” said Tom Payzant, superintendent for 117,000 students in the San Diego Unified School District.

“I’m not sure we should give in to the ambiguity and uncertainty by running scared,” Payzant said. “I would have thought long and hard about putting pressure on somebody to leave, if that in fact happened.”

Payzant said that before taking any action in Rogers’ case, he would have consulted with police agencies to determine the potential safety risks to her classroom and whether the government would be willing to provide added protection for the teacher and her students.

“Most likely, we would take it head on and deal with the security issues and say that things have got to get back to normal as quickly as possible,” Payzant said. “That’s the best message to send to everybody.

“You can’t develop the kind of atmosphere where everybody feels victimized and is fearful. Once people adopt that attitude, it really makes it very difficult for a school to be a place where creativity and learning can occur.”

Lowery said he met with the secretary of the Navy in Washington this last week and had been assured that the Navy and the San Diego police were willing to provide adequate security for Rogers, should she be allowed to continue her fourth-grade teaching assignment.

“To me, rather than firing Sharon Rogers, that strikes me as a better approach,” Lowrey said.

Rene Townsend, superintendent of the 16,000-student Vista Unified School District, said she would have tried to transfer the teacher to a different job in the district while the bombing investigation ran its course.