Philadelphia City Councilmember Isaiah Thomas. (Credit: City Council web site)
City officials in Philadelphia are scrutinizing a little-known school district practice that has sidelined dozens of educators for months – sometimes years – while misconduct allegations are investigated.
So-called “rubber rooms” are empty, windowless offices at district headquarters where teachers, administrators, and other staff accused of wrongdoing must report each day, collecting full pay but given virtually nothing to do.
The Philadelphia City Council, led by education committee chair Isaiah Thomas and at-large member Rue Landau, has taken aim at the practice, raising alarms about due process, transparency, and the cost of keeping staff in limbo. Councilmember Thomas introduced a resolution in January authorizing hearings on the “reassignment rooms," as they are formally known.
“Putting teachers in a disgusting room with little communication or due process is not a solution, and not a good strategy for teacher retention,” Thomas told the Philadelphia Inquirer, calling for immediate reforms.
City Council unanimously adopted the measure, signaling broad concern over what has been described as an opaque and inefficient disciplinary system.
Rubber rooms operate as holding centers for school employees during misconduct probes. A teacher or staffer accused of an impropriety – anything from excessive absenteeism to serious abuse allegations – can be removed from their school and assigned to these rooms until their case is resolved. Inside the district’s North Broad Street administration building, three conference rooms are set aside: one each for teachers, principals, and support staff. Those reassigned must sign in every morning and spend the day there, away from students.
The rooms themselves are spartan – rows of plastic chairs and tables in a plain office setting. Supervisors rarely visit, and employees say they receive little to no guidance or work tasks. As long as they stay put, staff are not required to do anything related to teaching or their normal duties. Some bring books or even personal projects to pass the time. Others simply sit, nap, or pace the halls, waiting for updates on their cases.
For the educators stuck in these rooms, the experience can be surreal.
“They treat you like trash there,” one Philadelphia school employee told the Inquirer of the rubber room after spending over a year in one.
With no real oversight, some staff signed in and then left for hours – to grab lunch, go to the gym, or even run errands – before returning to clock out. Others tried to make the best of it: reading, drawing, doing yoga, or quietly socializing with colleagues in the same boat. On one Halloween, a few employees dressed up as prisoners to poke fun at their predicament.
One administrator told the Inquirer the district paid him about $225,000 over 18 months “to do absolutely nothing” until he was eventually exonerated and allowed to return to work.
Teachers and staff assigned to the rubber room often languish there far past the district’s own guidelines. Philadelphia School District policy calls for most investigations to be finished within 60 days (90 days for complex cases like Title IX sexual misconduct claims). In practice, many cases far exceed those timelines.
“Some personnel have spent multiple years being paid to show up and not work,” Councilmember Thomas noted in his hearing resolution. Thomas said he heard from one individual stuck in the rubber room for two and a half years without resolution.
School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. issued a statement through a district spokesperson.
"Per administrative procedure 348A and 348 B., employee investigations are to be completed within 60 days for non-Title IX cases and within 90 days for Title IX cases. Investigations not completed within this time period are considered backlogged,” he said. in the statement. “From July 2024 - January 2025, the number of backlogged investigations, for employees who were assigned to the reassignment room, was reduced 46 to six, which represents an 87% reduction."
Critics say the process lacks basic transparency. Many reassigned educators are never clearly told what accusations they face, or how long their exile might last.
“People did not understand exactly why they were there, and they did not know how long they would be there,” Councilmember Thomas said of the complaints his office received.
In some instances, teachers remain in limbo even after external investigators clear them of wrongdoing. Allegations involving student safety often trigger a parallel probe by the city’s Department of Human Services (DHS). DHS typically rules on abuse claims within 90 days, yet teachers can sit in the rubber room for months longer while the district’s internal review lags behind
Philadelphia’s teachers union, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), has voiced strong concerns. PFT President Arthur Steinberg applauded recent steps to speed up investigations but issued a statement that the process is still taking too long, and that amid a district-wide staffing shortage, the absence of just one educator from classrooms is one too many – especially since most of staff are eventually cleared of any misconduct.
The union warns that keeping cleared teachers idle – even after they’ve been vindicated – reflects “bureaucratic inefficiencies” that ultimately harm students and strain remaining staff. The cost to taxpayers also raises red flags. Each reassigned teacher continues earning salary (roughly $120,000 a year with benefits on average) while the district often must pay a substitute to cover their classes.
In late 2024, Councilmember Thomas said one motivation for his inquiry was to examine “how much money we’re wasting” on this double expenditure. The PFT similarly called for “attacking bureaucratic inefficiencies…to free precious resources that could be redirected into classrooms."
Philadelphia’s City Council took action after media reports and whistleblowers spotlighted these problems. In January, Landau – herself a public school parent – joined Thomas in urging Council to investigate what was happening in the rubber rooms. Thomas introduced a resolution calling for hearings on “the existence, purpose, use and procedures” of the reassignment rooms.
“We’re told the investigations are happening pretty rapidly, so why are folks sitting there? That’s what we want to examine,” Thomas said.
The resolution noted that “several hundred” employees may be sent to the rooms each year (a figure the district disputed as too high) and pointed out the irony of an under-funded school system paying people “to show up and not work” for extended periods. It also cited reports of “communications and transparency problems” with the process going back decades.
Councilmembers unanimously approved the measure on January 23, signaling bipartisan agreement that the issue merited scrutiny.
Thomas planned to hold public hearings where teachers assigned to rubber rooms, district officials, DHS investigators, and union representatives could all testify. Councilmember Landau and others called for reforms, arguing that teachers shouldn’t be left in “purgatory” without timely due process. “The topic of school faculty discipline can be uncomfortable,” Thomas said, “but […] not knowing why you’re there or how long you’ll be there is unacceptable."
The council’s pressure quickly prompted a response. By mid-April, Superintendent Watlington and Councilmember Thomas held a joint news conference to announce changes and report progress. Thomas said he was “pleased” that the district had begun to overhaul the system, and as a result he put the planned hearings on hold (for now). Still, both he and Landau cautioned that continued oversight may be needed to ensure the promised improvements take hold.
Under scrutiny from City Council and the public, the School District of Philadelphia has begun taking steps to reform its reassignment room process. Superintendent Watlington acknowledged that the disciplinary case management had been “sluggish” and “lackluster”, contributing to excessive delays.
In response, the district instituted new measures in early 2025 aimed at speeding up investigations and improving communication. Among the reforms, the district established a formal intake procedure for any employee sent to the reassignment room, so that no one is left unsure why they have been removed from their school.
Going forward, staff will be given clearer information on the allegations and what to expect next. Administrators also rolled out a new case-tracking system and weekly monitoring of investigative timelines. The goal is to ensure each case stays within the 60- or 90-day window whenever possible.
“We already see more timely investigations. We see that it’s become more efficient,” Thomas noted cautiously, crediting the district for “cleaning up” many egregiously overlong cases. The district has also moved to make the rubber rooms less of an oversight blind spot. Officials say they now take attendance in the rooms and conduct multiple daily inspections to ensure acceptable conditions.
Staff assigned to the rooms should receive more regular status updates about their case and estimated timeline, addressing the communication void that was a top complaint. And when an employee is cleared and allowed to return to work, the district pledges to improve transition planning so that teachers can get back to classrooms faster.
In the past, even exonerated educators sometimes sat in the rubber room for additional weeks awaiting bureaucratic steps to reassign them. Despite these efforts, challenges remain. The staffing of the investigative unit is limited – currently just five individuals (including supervisors) handle all cases of employees in the rubber room.
The district is seeking to fill two additional administrative positions to help oversee the process, but Watlington noted he will wait for a full analysis before any new hiring as funding constraints are an ever-present backdrop.
Still, as City Council members pointed out, the district’s annual budget is tight, and any system that pays educators to “look at walls and draw pictures” (as Thomas lamented) for months on end is ripe for reform.
Philadelphia is not the first city to wrestle with the controversy of “rubber rooms.” In New York City – which has the nation’s largest school system – hundreds of teachers for years were relegated to similar reassignment centers while awaiting disciplinary hearings. At their peak in the late 2000s, NYC’s rubber rooms housed around 600 teachers on any given day.
Educators would report to these off-campus offices and sit for entire school days doing no work, often for months or even years until their cases were resolved. Investigations and arbitration trials in New York frequently stretched on; one notorious case saw a teacher stuck in a rubber room for up to 10 years without conclusion.
The toll on city finances was steep – an estimated $30 million to $65 million per year in salaries for teachers in limbo (not counting the cost of substitutes).
The “Kafkaesque and costly system” became a public scandal and a punchline in the late 2000s, depicted as a bureaucratic purgatory for educators. Facing mounting criticism, New York officials moved to dismantle the rubber room system in 2010. Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg struck a deal with the teachers’ union to eliminate the centralized holding rooms and expedite the disciplinary process. The agreement mandated that teachers under investigation would no longer spend idle months in large group rooms. By fall 2010, New York City announced it had “erased” the rubber rooms and reassigned those teachers to either back-office duties or expedited hearings.
In practice, the reform closed the infamous warehouse-like centers, but challenges persisted. Many teachers in NYC were still kept away from classrooms during investigations – only now they were scattered to various administrative offices or even assigned to their own homes, rather than congregated in one place.
Cases still took a long time to adjudicate in some instances, and the underlying tension between ensuring due process for teachers and protecting students remained. Still, New York’s example showed that policy changes and contract timelines could at least reduce the most egregious scenarios. (The 2010 NYC reforms introduced stricter timelines for hearings in the union contract, something Philadelphia’s union contract currently lacks.)
Other districts have grappled with similar issues on a smaller scale.
Los Angeles gained attention for its so-called “teacher jail” in the 2010s – teachers accused of misconduct were removed to district offices each day, leading to complaints and eventually reforms to shorten the process. Chicago and other large systems generally place accused staff on paid leave or desk duty, but if investigations stall, it can create de facto rubber room situations.
Education experts note that balancing fairness to employees with student safety is a tricky task. Removing a teacher immediately after a serious allegation can be prudent to protect children, but if the inquiry drags on, an essentially indefinite suspension with pay results – which is costly, demoralizing, and potentially unfair if the teacher is innocent. New York City’s experience highlighted the importance of setting clear deadlines and providing alternative work when possible, to avoid teachers simply “doing nothing” on the public dime.
