Few Wyoming teachers challenge dismissals

By JACKIE BORCHARDT - Star-Tribune staff writer

Many Wyoming teachers considered the death of Senate File 52 last week to be a huge victory.

The “teacher tenure” bill would have made all teachers “at-will” employees, removing protection for teachers with at least three years’ experience in a certain district. The impact would have been sweeping: Nearly three-fourths of Wyoming teachers have taught more than three years in the state.

The bill was one of several aimed at reforming the teaching profession, one area lawmakers seek to change in order to produce better student achievement. Lawmakers agreed schools are well-funded but contended Wyoming students don’t perform as well as they should given the $1.2 billion poured into schools each year.

True, Wyoming spent the sixth-highest amount per pupil in the country in 2008 — the most when adjusted for regional cost differences. And Wyoming hovers in the middle of the pack, according to the ACT and the National Assessment of Education Progress. But state and national test scores have improved since 2005, when the Legislature expanded education funding and increased teacher salaries.

But small improvements fall short, according to many lawmakers and their constituents.

Schools and educators need to be held accountable for the state’s investment, lawmakers said in months of meetings of the Legislature’s Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration, before the current legislative session.

They heard testimony from educators and state officials on how to build a system to measure school and district performance.

They discussed teacher quality. They discussed student assessments. They discussed reading, writing and math. They discussed school administrators.

They didn’t discuss tenure.

Firing teachers

Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody, said his bill, Senate File 52, was driven by talk of accountability in education during the legislative interim and complaints from constituents.

Stories about the difficulty of firing ineffective teachers drove debate. Lawmakers say lengthy, cumbersome hearings for terminated teachers cost districts time and money and scare administrators away from firing bad teachers. Teachers say the system is in place, but administrators aren’t following through.

Teachers with fewer than three years under their belts can be fired for any reason, and they do not have to be told the reason. Teachers obtain continuing-contract status after serving three years in a particular school district and thus have their contracts automatically renewed annually unless they resign, retire or are lawfully dismissed.

State law specifies reasons for which continuing-contract teachers can be fired: “incompetency, neglect of duty, immorality, insubordination, unsatisfactory performance or any other good or just cause.”

Typically, the termination process for under-performing teachers begins months to one year in advance of the actual termination, said Joel Dvorak, superintendent of the Natrona County School District.

In Natrona County, teachers who receive an “unsatisfactory” rating can be placed on a “plan of improvement.” The plan outlines specific goals and benchmarks for improvement in a certain amount of time. If the teacher does not improve, then termination can be recommended.

A continuing-contract teacher can request an independent hearing upon termination. The Wyoming Education Association will pay legal fees for members requesting hearings if the outcome is likely to set precedent, said association president Kathryn Valido. She said the association also helps the teacher resolve issues before reaching a hearing.

State statute specifies the hearing should take place no more than 45 days after notice of termination.

It rarely happens that way.

Procedural problems

Although a timeline is set, both parties usually agree to extend the time, said Kathleen Dixon, attorney for the Natrona County School District.

The district must prove cause for firing the continuing-contract teacher, which requires depositions of staff members, finding and copying documents and sorting through personnel files. Work must be done around attorneys’ and district employees’ schedules.

“As a result, that hearing process is not as streamlined, nor does it happen as quickly as we would like,” Dixon said.

And then there’s the cost.

The teacher and school district share the cost of the independent hearing officer, usually a local attorney, but otherwise pay separate fees. The cost varies depending on the intensity of the legal process.

One figure circulating the State Capitol is $135,000 — the cost to terminate a continuing-contract teacher last year in the Natrona County School District.

Legal fees and indirect costs total $131,049, according to district reports. However, $37,500 of that is attributed to staff time for salaried administrators and employees, for which they did not receive extra pay. Three of those employees work in the human resources department.

The district inflated those calculations, said Erin Kendall, the attorney who represented the teacher. For example, 25 hours of work was recorded for administrator Mel Hamilton, and Kendall said his involvement in the actual case was no more than a two-hour deposition.

Dvorak said staff members tallied hours based upon meetings and other scheduled events, but the figures do not include the emotional cost.

“There’s a time cost and a human cost to this,” Dvorak said. “There’s a lot of work that didn’t happen by those administrators who were intimately involved in this because of the process.”

Dvorak said the teacher has no incentive to speed up the process because he or she receives pay during the process and, in most cases, legal fees are covered by the WEA.

Rare hearings

However pricey the process, it doesn’t happen often.

Longtime school board members across the state said a full-blown hearing might happen once every four or five years.

Last year’s case in Natrona County was the first in a decade and the only contested termination case in Wyoming last year. The case also differed from the norm, in that it involved the Natrona County District Court — twice.

The school district filed in court to appoint a hearing officer — the second time in state history, according to Pat Hacker, an attorney who has represented teachers for 38 years.

The case returned to District Court when school district officials refused to release a report related to the teacher’s personnel file. This is the only time in 53 years that court intervention was needed to obtain such documents, according to Hacker.

Most of the time, terminated teachers go quietly.

Wyoming school districts each fired, on average, 2.6 teachers in 2007-08, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Most were continuing-contract teachers — two, on average, per district.

Of the 7,273 teachers employed in 2009-10, 567 did not return for the 2010-11 school year and most, 361, were teachers with four years or more experience, according to state reports.

Applying the termination rate to last year’s data would mean about 27 percent of continuing-contract teachers who left were terminated.

In Natrona County, 14 teachers were fired in 2009-10, according to district reports. Only one was a continuing-contract teacher. No continuing-contract teachers were fired in 2007-08 or 2008-09.

“In any organization, you probably have 5 percent of the work force or less who aren’t as great performers as you’d like them to be,” Dvorak said. “And I’d say education is no different than that.”

Dvorak said due process should stay, that teachers deserve good and clear expectations and reasons for termination. But he said the current process creates an undue burden on all involved.

“If it was as simple as holding teachers accountable, it’d be a real simple problem to fix,” Dvorak said.

He’d rather focus on “growing teachers” than getting rid of them. The district recently overhauled the 30-year-old evaluation system to focus on student performance and teacher improvement

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, when teachers know what’s expected and get good feedback, they do a good job,” Dvorak said.

Legislation

The two teacher-tenure bills died last week — SF52 and House Bill 212 — but reform of the system looks likely to happen before the session ends.

The Senate approved SF70 and SF146 — school and teacher accountability bills.

The Wyoming Accountability Act would measure school and district performance and growth according to reading, math and writing tests, the ACT test and high school graduation rate.

The Teacher Accountability Act would base teacher evaluations in part on student achievement and require satisfactory performance for three consecutive years before earning continuing-contract status.

The bill won over senators concerned with losing due process rights for teachers. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Phil Nicholas, R-Laramie, said due process protects employers from civil rights lawsuits as well as teachers from political decisions.

“These due process costs are an insignificant part of our total budget to ensure good teachers are treated fairly,” Nicholas said in support of the bill.

SF146 would refer hearings to the state Office of Administrative Hearings, which conducts hearings for driver’s license citations and state employee disciplinary action.

Both bills charge a special committee of educators with investigating this year how assessment scores should be determined so the system can be implemented for the 2012-13 school year. The House approved a bill to investigate pay increases for high-performing teachers.

The bills now cross the Capitol for additional testimony and debate and will likely change.

Not expected to change: the desire to continually improve, to make the most of the state’s resources and the conversation around accountability.

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