Late today I received a letter via email from the NYC Schools/Dept of Education along with some thirty-pages of personnel records for Mark Dayton...the letter opened with this:

Dear Ms Kihne:

I am writing with respoect to your recent Freedmom of Information Law (FOIL) request.  In an email sent on August 31, 2010, you clarified that the subject of your request may have worked at "P.S. 65- then on the lower east side of Manhattan."  In the interim, I also learned from a web search that the "Mark B. Dayton" about whom you seek records is in fact the former U.S. Senator and current Minnesota gubernatorial candidate.  I also found a teaching certificate posted online.

The NYC DOE Division of Human Resources was able to use this additional information to match it to an entry in its personnel database, and as a result was able to locate a personnel file for Mark Dayton. 

The rest of the letter refers to personnel record laws in the State of NY.

I'm unclear as to the legalities of posting these records, so I'm not posting them.  But here are the documents included:

July 9, 1969 Application for License Under Alternative B Requirements

August 7, 1969: Tentative Eligibility Check Form

Sept 4, 1969 Application for Teacher’s License

Certificate of Commencement of Services February 2, 1970

January 11, 1971 Certificate of Termination of Services

Not-dated Illegible Application for Reduction of Probationary Period

Based on these documents, I will correct my statement that "There is no record of Mark Dayton teaching in the New York Public School System"

There are indeed records of Mark Dayton teaching.  Here are some facts from the documents:

• September 8, 1969 – January 30, 1970— Mark Dayton was a Substitute teacher at JHS 65
• February 2, 1970 Mark Dayton officially commenced his services to the NYC Schools
• January 11, 1971-Mark Dayton Tendered Resignation via official form, Cause of resignation: "Personal Reasons"
• Resignation Effective February 1, 1971, Last day of actual service January 29, 1971

Based on these new facts, I believe that Mark Dayton was an official teacher with the NYC Schools for 1 year.

If you want to count in the substitute teaching, he taught for 16 months.  

He tendered his resignation on January 11, 1971.  Why would he resign in January?  What a strange month to quit.  It makes no sense.  What were his personal reasons for quitting this job?  According to the documents, he jumped through hoops to get this job.  He hooked up with Teachers Inc so he could take 12 credits worth of coursework between June and Sept 1969 to qualify a teacher's license.  He worked as a substitute teacher before getting the job. He has the job for less than one year and he quits?

No calls to the Dayton campaign were returned to to try to close-out this story and get some facts.  Perhaps the media here can get Senator Dayton to call them back and explain why he quit "the toughest job he ever had."

The story is odd, the campaign's reaction was especially odd and although we may have more facts, I still don't think we have the story of Mark Dayton's time in NYC that he has chosen to make such a prominent part of his life story. 

He brags about his teaching service to this day- this job takes up one paragraph of a six paragraph biography that Mark Dayton pens on his current campaign website:

After college, I taught 9th grade general science for two years in a New York City public school. It was the toughest job I’ve ever had! My conscience was seared by the terrible injustice that my students had so little, while I had been given so much; and I decided that I would devote my life to improving social equality and economic opportunity for all Americans.

Thank you to the folks at NYC Schools for diligently finding these records.  I will only add that I can get 30 pages of 40-year-old records from across the country faster than I can get one line item from the Eden Prairie Schools budget.