OPSB, RSD unification calls for reapplication for some
23rd April 2018 · 0 Comments
Editor’s Note: Since the publishing of this story, the OPSB has reached out to The Louisiana Weekly to clarify that some non-teacher RSD staff will be required to go through a reapplication process. This article has been updated to reflect those corrections.
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Roughly a dozen years after the Orleans Parish School Board and the state Department of Education fired thousands of teachers and staff in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the OPSB is leaving hundreds of existing teachers dangling and concerned about their jobs moving forward as part of the ongoing unification of the OPSB and the Recovery School District, with one educator stating that teachers are being “put through hell.”
In May 2016, the State Legislature adopted Act 91, which requires all schools that had been taken over by the RSD in the wake of Katrina to come back under the OPSB umbrella by July 1 of this year. All of the newly unified schools will continue as individually chartered institutions.
While the unification process has proceeded haltingly and in fits and starts, as the last handful of local schools are being brought back to OPSB oversight, some existing RSD staff who want to continue as OPSB staff post-unification are being put through a re-application and/or retention process.
Multiple teachers and staff people who spoke to The Louisiana Weekly on condition of anonymity out of fear for their jobs expressed frustration, exhaustion and anxiety as they wait to find out if they’ll still have employment after the completion of unification.
According to an email from the OPSB, “For that much smaller number of non-teacher RSD staff, the OPSB Office of Human Resources is conducting as normal the typical recruitment and selection processes. That includes, amongst other things, posting jobs, prescreening candidates, and conducting interviews via OPSB staff committees. Current RSD employees who chose to apply will participate in this process just like all applicants, but this is a small number of central office staff currently employed by the RSD, not teachers at individual school campuses.”
The grueling, tense process has left many teachers confused, demoralized and feeling like unification and the charter-school system have let everyone involved down. Some educators even question whether the system of education being constructed with unification is even legal.
“Given that the charter-school movement is legally invalid and convoluted,” one teacher said, “it is beyond me why the Orleans Parish School Board would work so hard to make the charter system the definitive system of education in this city.”
Compounding the uncertainty of their employment status, sources say, is that there appears to be no uniform or standard method of staffing teachers existing across Orleans Parish, with each individual school running the employment process differently.
One source said the RSD asked the OPSB to adopt a brand new human resources policy that would be passed by the State Legislature to help the transition run more smoothly and with as little disruption of operations as possible. The source said the OPSB turned down the RSD’s request, leaving hundreds of teachers twisting in the wind.
One teacher said she was told that at their school, all jobs were being posted publicly, with the interview process continuing now. As a result, all current employees at the school were being forced to essentially re-apply all over again and be placed in the same pool as new applicants. Other teachers said some schools are deciding which existing staffers to offer a new contract moving forward. Those who are not extended contract offers are left unemployed, with the option of re-applying seemingly futile.
In each case, the result, sources say, is hundreds, if not thousands of educators on pins and needles. The ongoing application process and the cloudiness of several key questions — including whether OPSB will consider re-hiring teachers fired after Katrina, by what rubric the current job applicants will be evaluated, and why the OPSB declined to revise its HR policy — have left many current RSD employees in limbo.
OPSB representatives initially declined to be interviewed for this article despite multiple attempts, but the board did offer a statement in response to all questions:
“The Orleans Parish School Board Office of Human Resources is conducting as normal the typical recruitment and selection processes, which include, amongst other things, posting jobs, pre-screening candidates, and conducting interviews via OPSB staff committees. Current Recovery School District (RSD) employees will participate in this process just like all applicants.”
After the publication of this story, the OPSB sent out a larger statement insisting that only a small amount of RSD staff and not teachers are being put through the reapplication process.
RSD officials declined to comment and deferred to the OPSB.
United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) President Jim Randels declined to comment on the application process, stating that he wasn’t aware of such a policy within OPSB, although he did state that he’s aware that the staff at McDonogh 35 High School are being required to reapply for their jobs.
Randels said UTNO is “not pleased or displeased” with the progress and execution of unification.
“I don’t think it has any effect on the daily work of our teachers,” he said.
For some, the complicated OPSB application and staffing policies are symbolic of the larger challenges erupting from the unification process.
“What’s the purpose of doing that?” posed State Rep. Joseph Bouie (D-New Orleans) when asked about the application process last week. “It exemplifies the confusion of bringing these schools back under [OPSB] control.”
Many in the public are aware of the uncertainty and irregularity wracking teachers. At a community meeting Thursday night at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, some of the more than 100 people who attended listed staffing strife and confusion as a very observable symptom of larger unification dysfunction.
At the meeting, Bouie noted that while the OPSB has general oversight over all schools, it’s the boards of individual charter institutions that actually run each school with their own boards. That includes employment practices, including who is hired and who is fired. Bouie charged that schools are able to hire non-state-certified teachers at will.
Bouie said that often it is unclear exactly where and with whom ultimate responsibility and power lies. Some speakers expressed concern that the employment process is either eliminating or pushing out veteran, experienced African-American teachers in favor of less-experienced staff who have no knowledge or connection to the community.
Outside observers, however, used caution in addressing the employment process under unification, stating that the situation in New Orleans is unlike any other city in the nation.
“I don’t know enough about how other municipalities handle hiring to answer this, but I would say that no other place in the country has had a similar school landscape to New Orleans,” said Vincent Rossmeier, director of policy at the Cowen Institute at Tulane University. “The decentralization has been and will continue to be unique, so I’m not sure any other place would offer a clear parallel.”
Kency Nittler, manager of teacher trends at the National Council on Teacher Quality, said traditional educational and employment practices in this situation would seem to be somewhat inapplicable.
“Since the RSD schools are charter schools, having traditional school board application requirements would be very unusual,” Nittler said.
But she also echoed the thoughts of the Cowen Institute’s Rossmeier, noting that New Orleans, for better or for worse, is venturing into unknown territory with its unification process.
“There really isn’t a precedent,” she said. “We’re talking about a large number of schools, and with RSD being charter schools, I absolutely believe this situation is unique. Trying to compare or judge New Orleans would be very difficult in this situation.”
In May 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed Act 91, which had been adopted by the State Legislature and decreed that all public schools in New Orleans — including the dozens that had been taken over by the RSD — come under the control of the OPSB by July 1 of this year. However, schools that had fallen under RSD control after Katrina have been allowed to re-join Orleans Parish schools before then, and dozens such schools have exercised that option and become OPSB institutions already.
But under Act 91, the OPSB has no control of staffing in charter schools, a fact that further confuses the status of teachers and other employees. States the act, in part:
“Unless mutually agreed to by both the charter school’s governing authority and the local school board pursuant to a duly authorized resolution adopted by each governing entity, the local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction in the area(s) of… hiring and firing of personnel, employee performance management and evaluation, terms and conditions of employment, teacher or administrator certification, salaries and benefits, retirement, [and] collective bargaining…”
How the requirements of Act 91 are impacting the employment and staffing situations for the RSD and OPSB remains unclear, but the state law isn’t the only facet of the current status of teachers locally.
The OPSB dismissed almost all of its staff – including thousands of teachers – shortly following Hurricane Katrina as part of a massive, large-scale move toward privatization based on a new, charter-school-based system that supposedly would provide families with a choice of schools. The wholesale firing of the staff as the RSD was created and began assuming temporary control of New Orleans schools triggered a lawsuit filed on behalf of the thousands of teachers who were laid off.
The suit argued that the rights of the teachers had been ignored and violated by the mass termination.
While lower courts initially ruled in favor of the teachers, in October 2014, the Louisiana Supreme Court overruled the lower courts’ decisions and dismissed the case, stating in its majority ruling that “we find that neither the OPSB nor the State defendant’s [sic] violated the class members’ due process rights.”
The court added that the OPSB’s actions met standing due process standards, and concluding that “there is no constitutionally protected property interest in the right to ‘priority consideration’ for employment with a third party, and the plaintiffs offered no proof they were not given priority consideration.”
In a brief concurring opinion, associate justice Greg Guidry acknowledged, “The impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath upon the citizens of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana was devastating and will be long-lasting. Equally affected were the plaintiffs, dedicated teachers and employees of the Orleans Parish School Board.
But, he concluded, “Nevertheless, the facts of the case before us, and the law of this state, compel the result reached by the majority.”
The State Supreme Court’s ruling prompted the plaintiffs, who were represented by New Orleans attorney William Zanders Sr., to appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2015.
However, the highest court in the land quickly declined to hear the case — on May 18, 2015, the court denied the plaintiffs’ petition for a writ of certiorari, effectively ending the case and killing the teachers’ suit.
While the ultimately unsuccessful legal action worked its way through the courts system, other troubling signs have developed, including a May 2017 report by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans.
According to the study, the OPSB dismissed about 4,300 teachers following Katrina, and while many of those laid off did initially return to positions in public schools in the state, by 2013 the level of returning former employees had plummeted to 37 percent of the pre-Katrina employee cohort, including only 22 percent in New Orleans. The study further found that the teacher attrition rate — the percentage of laid-off staff that decided to abandon public-school employment in Louisiana – was significantly higher than other parishes that had been affected by Katrina.
In addition, the report further stated that 73 percent of the teachers given pink slips were Black, and 78 percent were female. By fall 2007, roughly half of the 3,076 Black teachers fired post-Katrina had left public school employment in Louisiana; the ratio grew to 62 percent by 2013. Overall, the study reported that while the long-term impact of the mass firing remains unclear — especially on the quality of education in the city — there can be no doubt that it negatively impacted the careers and lives of those dismissed.
“The dismissal of the entire New Orleans public school teacher workforce was a particularly controversial component of the reforms that took place following Hurricane Katrina,” it stated. “In addition to the losses directly inflicted by the effects of the hurricane, these teachers faced unemployment and dramatically altered prospects for future employment.
“While the educational implications here are ambiguous, what is clear is that the mass dismissals have had a lasting impact on the teachers themselves, their families, and the community. This will be part of the public discourse on the New Orleans school reforms for many years to come.”
Also involved in the complex equation is the number, quality and experience levels of current and hopeful teachers in the RSD and OPSB pre- and post-unification. As stated by The Louisiana Weekly reporter Kari Dequine Harden in September 2016, Act 91 “does nothing to address the system’s reliance on unqualified, uncertified, inexperienced teachers.”
In February of this year, the OPSB passed a resolution calling for state officials to immediately address the lack of qualified teachers in the state and in New Orleans. Also of concern in the assertion that New Orleans teachers aren’t paid what they’re worth and what’s commensurate with their workload; some observers believe that current teachers might not be paid enough to even make ends meet in New Orleans.
The Unification Advisory Committee, created by Act 91 to guide the reintegration of RSD schools under the OPSB umbrella, met last month and issued a 40-page unification milestone update that reported that 34 proposed milestones under the unification plan have been met.
This article originally published in the April 23, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
