Texas Teacher Law

Son, you/re gonna drive me to killin' if you don't get your students TAKS a'drillin'

A New Braunfels ISD teacher was reassigned to an alternative center in a dust-up over TAKS scores at her campus. She claimed the principal placed so much pressure on the teachers to bring in high scores that at one point he even threatened to "kill" her if her students' TAKS performance wasn't up to his expectations.

She filed a police complaint for assault. She also filed a grievance asking to be returned to an assignment on a regular campus.

Last night the NBISD board heard her grievance and after an apparently long deliberation, denied the request for reassignment. The brief news report is here.

That's the trouble with grievances. They are limited in what they can accomplish - limited by the common sense, moral compass, and quality of advice received by the people hearing the grievance. Even if the NBISD board agreed with this teacher that the principal was way, way out of line for making the comment, the remdy available to the teacher is subject to very wide discretionary latitude. It would be perfectly okay for the board to have said "we agree with you that the comments shouldn't have been made, and we're even going to take the initiative to reprimand the prinicpal for making them, but we're going to leave you in the new assignment anyway."

Some complaints do have clear remedies that are backed by legal principals, but many don't. The right to be heard is not always paired with a rght to put everything back the way it was.

By the way, did anyone get the song reference in the title to this post?

Drunk and Teaching

It would make a great scene in a teen comedy. I can see it clearly in my mind's eye. But in real life it's only a little funny.

A substitute teacher in Richardson ISD was arrested for public intoxication after failing a field sobriety test in the classroom (see, I told you it would make a great movie scene). The news blurb is here.

Alcoholism and other substance addictions can actually be protected disabilities under the Americans With Disabilities Act. But there is no protection for actual impairment - so if you're drunk at work you can be disciplined or fired. But if you are an alcoholic who is in treatment and do not come to work impaired, your job may be protected by law.

Teachers Reporting District Misconduct

North Forest ISD, near Houston, is under investigation. Not just by this TV station for problems in it's special education classrooms, but also by the federal government for misuse of federal special education grant money. Some of the allegations involve the classrooms directly, such as needed adaptive equipment not obtained and lack of textbooks in special education classrooms.

To classroom teachers, fiscal mismanagement is not always apparent, although rumors and speculation may be plentiful. But some things - such as an IEP that calls for equipment that no administrator ever delivers on - are problems that may be known to the classroom teacher most clearly and before anyone else.

What, if anything, should a teacher do when she knows that illegal activity or severe mismanagement is taking place?

It's a trickier question than you might think.

Chain of Command
Most of the time, reporting problems up the chain of command (that is, to your immediate supervisor first, then to the next supervisory level, etc) is enough to take care of the problem. Sometimes, though, that doesn't work, because the problem is so high up that there's no one to take care of it, or because the problem has become so widespread no one is sure who's responsible, or simply because no one wants to do anything.

Whistleblower
The Texas Whistleblower statute protects employees who report what they reasonably believe to be a violation of law to an appropriate law enforcement agency. So a teacher could report suspected illegal activity outside the chain of command. However, to be protected by the statute, the report must be made to a law enforcement agency - which means that telling board members does not invoke whistleblower protection. In many cases, telling the Texas Education Agency does not even invoke protection, since that agency does not actually have enforcement powers over school districts for most violations of education laws.

The whistleblower statute is tricky for school employees, because there are different agencies (TEA, local police department, federal department of education, federal prosecutors) that have enforcement powers over education laws, and which agency is the "right" one to report to depends on which law you think is being broken. The good part of the whistleblower statute is that you don't necessarily have to get everything exactly right in order to get the protection, but you do have to be acting in good faith and make a pretty logical and reasonable guess about what you do and who you tell.

Do Nothing
If a teacher knows of wrongdoing, they do not necessarily have a duty to do anything about it.
Exceptions are when there is harm, or risk of harm, to a child, or when doing nothing would somehow cause the teacher to participate in the wrongdoing. In some cases, the teacher may be required by the code of ethics to take action.

May Day

Since today is May 1, I was thinking about May Day. We celebrated the day with a little outdoor festival every year at my elementary school. We would set up the May Pole, and perform the dance and sing the songs we had been working on all throughout April in our music classes.

Yesterday my mother was telling me about the things she did to celebrate May Day as a kid, some of which I had never heard of before.

And it occurred to me that in all the years I have had my own kids in elementary school, during which time I have been a parent at four different schools, I can't ever remember any May Day celebrations. Did I just miss them, or is May Day no longer celebrated? Or, is it just not celebrated in Texas, overshadowed by Cinco de Mayo just a few days later?