Ex-Employee Sues School District to Get Job Back

A former Oxnard Elementary School District maintenance worker acquitted on child molestation charges last October has filed suit against the district after officials refused to give him his job back.

Allen K. Zeitzmann, a nine-year employee of the school district, is alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after officials claimed that he had “abandoned” his position, according to the recent lawsuit.

Richard Tentler, the attorney representing the 40-year-old Zeitzmann, said his client was simply complying with the district’s order not to return to work until resolution of the sex offense case against him.

“It’s kind of like a Catch-22,” Tentler said. “They order him to stay away, and then they claim he abandoned his position. . . . This is ludicrous.”

School district officials, including board chairman Arthur Joe Lopez and interim Supt. Richard Duarte, declined comment, saying the issue is a personnel matter.

“Obviously, we are bound to follow due process and we always do that,” Duarte said.

Zeitzmann, who unsuccessfully ran for the Port Hueneme City Council in 1996, also declined to discuss the matter.

Zeitzmann’s legal problems began in May 1997 when he was arrested by Port Hueneme police on suspicion of molesting three 9- and 10-year-old girls at the Seaview Avenue apartment complex where he lived.

In a June 5, 1997, letter from then-Supt. Bernard Korenstein, Zeitzmann was notified that he had been placed on a “compulsory leave of absence from his job.”

Zeitzmann was informed in the same letter that the “district reserves the right to take appropriate administrative disciplinary action, up to and including termination, notwithstanding the disposition of the criminal sex offense allegations.”

On Oct. 31, after a jury trial in Ventura County Municipal Court, Zeitzmann was cleared of the charges, according to the lawsuit.

On Nov. 8, Zeitzmann asked for his job back. The following month, Korenstein informed him by letter that although he would be paid through Aug. 20, 1997, his employment had been terminated because of “abandonment of position.”

“We take the position there was no abandonment whatsoever,” Tentler said. “They have never alleged or claimed that he is in any way unfit for his duty or that he poses any risk. . . . And in fact he does not.”

Meanwhile, Zeitzmann’s union, Local 272 of the California School Employees Assn., said it has not been asked to intervene in the dispute on his behalf.

“He’s not a union member anymore; he’s not with the district,” union President Jan Rhoads said. “He never did contact the union regarding any of the concerns that he did have.”

Tentler said the district has never claimed that Zeitzmann is a risk to students.

He added that the district is using the claim of abandonment to avoid giving his client a fair hearing.

“It’s transparently bogus,” he said. “The burden would be on them to show he was somehow unfit to return or he was a risk. Clearly, they don’t want to show that.”