Stories about this going on in New York City have been out for a while. This VoiceofSanDiego.org post is the first that I've seen mentioning the issue in our state.

Lynne Holyoke knew her principal wanted to fire her. The retired art teacher said the two had often sparred over her teaching style. But instead, Holyoke said the school district made her an offer: Take a year off with pay and resign at the end of it. Holyoke agreed and spent the year on paid administrative leave, doing art therapy, volunteering and mulling her future.

"It was like a package to go," she said.

Holyoke is not the only educator who has been pulled from her classroom but paid nonetheless. Fifty-six educators have been put on paid administrative leave in San Diego Unified over the last six years, taken out of their ordinary jobs but kept on the payroll for anywhere from a few days to more than four years.

Some teachers have been accused of crimes or inappropriate behavior and are removed from their classes until the charges are proven or disproven. Some are awaiting hearings that decide whether they will be fired. A small number are suffering medical problems.

And others such as Holyoke are paid as part of a settlement to avoid the expensive process of firing them, especially when the cases against them are difficult to prove in court.

School district attorney Mark Bresee said that teachers sometimes make formal pacts -- agreeing to resign in exchange for staying on paid leave for a fixed time -- and sometimes simply agree informally to resign after time. The practice is used across the country but rarely quantified.

While still uncommon in the sprawling school district, the frequency of paid administrative leave has increased significantly in the past two years, along with its costs. Estimates done by voiceofsandiego.org based on data provided by the school district found that the practice cost more than $2.1 million over the past six years. Costs have risen from an eventual payout of an estimated $262,000 for three teachers put on leave in the 2003-2004 school year to more than $716,000 -- and counting -- for 26 educators in 2008-2009.

As I mentioned when I posted about the New York City "rubber rooms" for teachers being paid to sit and wait, this is clearly a sign that the system doesn't work.

But the phenomenon also raises concerns, especially when it is used to avoid firing teachers. Critics complain that it is a symptom of an overly cumbersome and expensive process for terminating teachers that can take years to complete.

"This is just wrong," said William Wright, vice chairman of San Diego Unified's audit and finance committee, when told about the practice of buyouts. "It's just happening because it's so hard to fire somebody. They're buying them off with the taxpayers' money."

When the system to get rid of a bad or even criminal employee is so cumbersome that it is simply easier to pay them off with what ends up being a severance package from public funds, there is a problem. With a two-year cycle to tenure and a too complex system for getting rid of bad teachers after tenure, districts aren't left with much of a choice. I realize the districts agreed to the contract in the first place, so they have to bear some responsibility for the system, but it is difficult to hold out when the union can point to neighboring districts with similar contracts.

Thinking about this situation just confirms my belief that we need to reform teacher evaluation systems so that struggling teachers get the help they need and if they're unable to improve, there is a fair and easy way for the district to let them go. The $700,000 that San Diego Unified is spending to buy off teachers would be a good start to funding that sort of program in the district.