NEW YORK (NY)
Fox News
May 3, 2019
By Robert Gearty
An arbitrator has refused to fire a New Jersey sixth-grade teacher who fathered a child with a teenage girl nearly three decades ago when he was a parish priest.
Joseph DeShan was a Roman Catholic priest in Connecticut when the baby was born in 1990. The girl was 15 when she became pregnant. He was never reported to cops for having sex with an underage girl and he stopped being a priest in 1994. Two years later he became a teacher in Cinnaminson, N.J.
His termination was being sought by the Cinnaminson school board for fathering the child as a priest and for a recent comment he was accused of uttering to a young female student about her green eyes in a “weird voice,” according to the New York Post.
But the arbitrator ruled in a seven-page decision that DeShan couldn’t be fired on either basis because the comment to the young student was hearsay, and because the board had known about the teen and the child for 17 years.
“The BOE has not alleged that respondent engaged in any inappropriate conduct while holding public employment,” arbitrator Walt De Treux wrote in an April 2 decision, the Post reported Friday. “The fact that some parents now demand his removal from the classroom does not give the BOE a second opportunity to revisit pre-employment conduct of which it has been long aware.”
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