MIDDLETON, Wis. – In a rational world, any teacher who views pornography at work should pay the cost of that decision by losing his or her job.

But public schools that have been infiltrated by labor unions are not logical places, which explains why taxpayers are often the ones who bear the costs of a teacher’s bad decisions.

That’s certainly the case in Wisconsin’s Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, where an attempt to fire a porno-watching educator has boomeranged on taxpayers, costing them nearly $1 million in various bills, fees and payments.

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And that total continues to climb.

Wisconsin Reporter has learned that Middleton-Cross Plains taxpayers paid $24,315 to arbitrator Karen Mawhinney, who after an extraordinarily long arbitration hearing in 2012, ordered teacher Andrew Harris be reinstated to his job at Kromrey Middle School.

Harris was fired in 2010 after it was learned the 17-year science educator “viewed scores of pornographic and sexually inappropriate images on his computer at school over a 14-month period,” Watchdog.org reports. That sparked a four-year legal process that drained large sums of money from the district’s bank account and ultimately ended with Harris’ return to the classroom just days ago. (A full recap of the twists and turns in Harris’ case can be found here.)

But back to the arbitrator’s eye-popping $48,600 bill – the other half of which was paid for by Middleton Education Association, Harris’ teachers union.

Even Mawhinney acknowledges that her fee was unusually high, but told Wisconsin Reporter that’s because Harris’ case was “really extraordinary.”

While the district’s case against Harris was open-and-shut, problems arose for officials when the union learned that other educators who committed similar – though less severe – transgressions were only reprimanded or suspended, not fired.

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Those complications forced Mawhinney to approach the case with careful deliberation not seen since King Solomon of ancient Israel ordered the baby split in half.

According to billing records obtained by Wisconsin Reporter, Mawhinney received $1,000 each of the 31 days she spent writing her final 60-page decision. The arbitrator also charged $16,300 for the case’s 17 days of hearings, and another $1,330 for mileage. These amounts add up to $48,630 – $30 more than the reported total bill. Perhaps Mawhinney attached a coupon to her final bill.

Middleton-Cross Plains taxpayers might want to remember this sorry affair the next time they’re scrimping and saving to pay their school taxes. They’ll certainly be disgusted to know that some of the money they could have spent on their family or home ended up in an arbitrator’s pocket, simply because a teachers union decided to defend a porno-watching teacher.

The only way that $24,315 won’t be considered an absolute waste is if the Andrew Harris affair gets more people to understand that labor unions have no place in public education.