LITTLE ROCK — The Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers president on Tuesday handdelivered about 500 letters from Pulaski County Special School District teachers seeking hearings on the district-imposed changes in their 2012-13 contracts.
Attorneys for the district and the association said Tuesday they anticipate a date will be scheduled for a group hearing. The date and location for that hearing has not been set.
It also was not known Tuesday who exactly will conduct the one or more teacher hearings in light of the fact that the Pulaski County Special district was taken over by the state last year and its School Board dissolved. State Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell has served as the district’s board.
Employee grievance and disciplinary hearings over the past school year have been conducted and decided by a three-member committee headed by a former superintendent from another district.
“They haven’t told us who is going to be there to act as the school board,” said attorney Clayton Blackstock who, along with attorney Mark Burnette, represents the teachers association and the Pulaski Association of Support Staff.
“We’ll be working ... on a mutually agreeable time to conduct the hearings,” said Jay Bequette, an attorney for the school district.
“I’m sure it will be somewhat similar, if not identical, to the process we followed back in 2010 and then in 2005 when we had large groups of teachers that requested hearings.”
In 2010, the large group hearing was held in the Mills University Studies High School auditorium.
Bequette said it would be “Kimbrell’s call” on who will conduct the hearings.
Tuesday’s requests by teachers for hearings came after Kimbrell’s April 20 directive to the Pulaski County Special School District to ter- minate the union-negotiated contracts and discontinue recognizing the unions for teachers and support staff as the contract bargaining agents for those groups.
Kimbrell’s directives were intended to help cut a total of $11 million in expenses in the 17,000-student school district, which has been designated by the state as fiscally distressed and is operating under state control with a state-appointed superintendent.
Superintendent Jerry Guess sent letters to the district’s approximately 1,300 teachers beginning April 23, telling them their union-negotiated 2011-12 contracts would be replaced with contracts containing different terms and conditions.
The changes in the contract terms include reducing the teacher work year from 192 to 190 days, cutting two employee leave days and the phasing out of the salary payments made to teachers for completing districttaught short courses rather than college courses.
Guess said in the letter that teachers have a right to request a hearing, which had to be done in writing to the commissioner and to Guess within 30 days.
The hearing is to take place at an agreed upon time, Guess wrote in the letter. If no agreement can be reached on the time, then the hearing must be held no sooner than five days and no more than 20 days from the receipt of the hearing request.
“The hearing may be public or private at your request,” Guess advised the employees. “You may be represented by an attorney or other person(s) of your choosing, and the district may also be represented.”
The two employee associations and some of their members have sued the school district, Kimbrell and members of the district’s personnel policies committees in Pulaski County Circuit Court in an effort to preserve union recognition and union-negotiated contracts. No hearing dates have been set in those cases.
The school district, meanwhile, has asked a federal judge presiding in the Pulaski County Special School District desegregation lawsuit to endorse the district’s actions against the unions and the contracts.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 05/23/2012