Little Rock School District teachers who refused to do in-person teaching one day in September have so far failed to convince a district panel that penalties leveled against them -- up to five days of suspension and six days of docked pay -- should be overturned.
A teacher with a master's degree and 10 years of experience earns $51,990 for a 190-day work year. The loss of six days of pay for that teacher would be $1,641.79.
A total of 17 of the 68 teachers who participated in the Sept. 28 job action have now argued their cases for reimbursement of lost pay to the district's Community Advisory Board. As many as 32 more teachers have filed grievances that are yet to be heard.
In each of the 17 cases dealt with so far, the Community Advisory Board recommended to Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key that the penalties levied by Superintendent Mike Poore be upheld.
Until a newly elected school board is seated later this year, Key continues to serve in place of a school board in the state-controlled school district.
The penalties included suspension of the teacher from work for either three or five days -- and the loss of pay for those days -- as well as loss of pay for Sept. 28, the day the teachers taught students remotely.
Dunbar Middle School teacher Alice Kunce told the advisory board Tuesday, during the latest round of grievance hearings, that her motivation for participating in the day of remote teaching -- a job action called for by the Little Rock Education Association -- was not to disrupt her school, but to be safe.
"What did I expect the consequences to be?" Kunce said to the advisory panel whose meetings she regularly attends or watches online.
"I expected the reaction to be compassion," she said. "I expected you to understand what real fear is. I expected you to understand that this is bigger than all of us. This isn't about you told me to do something and I said no. I expected you to understand that people are afraid."
Kunce, a recently unsuccessful candidate for North Little Rock mayor, described for the advisory board her collapse in the classroom and trip to the emergency room because of respiratory problems presumably aggravated by classroom conditions, her allergy tests, her use of inhalers, her receipt of periodic injections for her allergies from the school nurse and her purchase of a $400 ventilation filter to ward off further problems.
"Instead of asking me why I was afraid, you punished me," Kunce said. "You said 'how dare you work from home even through we told you to do that the previous two weeks.'"
That was when Kunce was quarantined because of her exposure to someone at the school who had covid-19.
Kunce was joined by five other teachers -- Emily Harrell, Amber McCuien, Gladys Godley, Jennifer White and Megan Prettyman -- in the grievance hearings that were open to the public on the Zoom online meeting platform.
Advisory board members at the Tuesday hearings were Jeff Wood, Melanie Fox, LaShannon Spencer and Michael Mason.
Some of the six teachers' voices cracked with emotion as they told their reasons for deciding to work away from their classrooms that Sept. 28 and why they returned to work that week only to be given notice of their immediate multiday suspensions.
Harrell, a teacher at Pinnacle View Middle, told of the stress of teaching virtual and in-person classes while also helping other teachers use the Schoology online teaching program. On a whim, she took her blood pressure in the teacher's lounge -- recording a high reading that sent her to the doctor's office. She said she now takes a daily blood pressure medication at age 29.
Godley, 65, a career-technical education teacher at Parkview Magnet High who has been treated for lupus in the past, described the stress of having to keep students a safe distance apart and to repeatedly sanitize her computer laboratory while also worrying about her exposure to students -- athletes -- who had been exposed themselves early on in the school year to covid-19.
Why did she return to work? her attorney Greg Alagood asked.
"Our intention was to make the district aware that conditions were not safe," Godley said. "I wanted to do the right thing, so I went back," she said.
White, a teacher at Stephens Elementary, told of her commitment to being an advocate for students and her training in making data-driven decisions as reasons for her absence on campus that day.
McCuien, an advanced placement and mythology teacher at Central High, and Prettyman, the sole social studies teacher at the new West High School of Innovation, talked of covid's impact on their family members and the families of their students.
Prettyman said that in some ways teaching her students remotely and not having to wear a mask to do so was more effective than her teaching virtual and in-person students simultaneously in her classroom.
"While people in my class can hear my virtual students, my virtual students can"t really hear the in-person students, so I often have to repeat what they say. That changes the flow of the discussion, and it makes class longer. You cover less information, and it's less effective," Prettyman said.
In response to questions from their attorneys Alagood and Clayton Blackstock -- and over the objections of school system attorney Eric Walker -- teachers said their suspensions that took place in early October typically left their students without substitute teachers or adequate lessons, and with their teacher colleagues having to cover for them. The suspensions created a greater disruption than the one day of remote instruction caused, the teachers said.
Poore, the superintendent, testified to the advisory board that he learned on a Sunday night about the Little Rock Education Association's call for teachers to work only online the following Monday. That caused him to scramble to find district administrators and Arkansas Department of Education staff members to deploy to schools to cover the Monday classes. He said the association's plan was a disruption to student education.
Walker argued to the advisory board that the teachers knew in advance that they would be subject to discipline for their absences from their classrooms. Many, if not all, had been warned in writing of that potential -- including termination -- after they participated in a one-day teacher strike in November 2019, he said.
Initially, 69 teachers were identified as participating in the Sept. 28 refusal to teach in-person, but one teacher was later identified as being approved for family medical leave on that day, said Jordan Eason, the district's director of employee relations and benefits administration.
The first group of hearings for six employees was Oct. 22. The advisory board, and Key denied the grievances.
A second group of hearings was held for five employees on Nov. 4. The advisory board recommended denial of the grievances, and the district is waiting to hear back from Key on those, as well as those for the six employees whose hearings were last week. Another round of hearings is set for Tuesday.
CORRECTION: A Little Rock School District teacher with a master’s degree and 10 years of experience earns $51,990 for a 190-day work year. The loss of six days’ pay for that teacher would be $1,641.79. An earlier version of this article erred in the length of the teacher work year and the lost pay.