On December 20, 2018, at the Arkansas State Board of Education (SBoE), board member Ouida Newton moved to “waive the application of both the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act (TFDA) and the Public School Employee Fair Hearing Act pursuant to Arkansas Code 6–15–2916. These waivers will be applicable to all schools within the [Little Rock] District and all certified and classified employees, effective immediately and through the 2019–2020 school year.”
The SBoE knew this waiver would meet strong resistance from the Little Rock Education Association (LREA) and the scores of Little Rock School District (LRSD) stakeholders filling the auditorium and multiple overflow rooms that day. Education Commissioner Johnny Key had originally indicated he wanted a TFDA waiver only for “failing” schools in LRSD — not the whole district.
Superintendent Mike Poore opposed Ms. Newton’s motion to waive the TFDA for all of LRSD, stating, “…now you make this become a much, much bigger deal and that scares me, to be honest with you, Ms. Newton.”
Ms. Newton responded by explaining her reasoning behind waiving TFDA for the entire district, indicating she thought LRSD needed freedom to fire its bad administrators quickly— not just its bad teachers.
“My focus is not on the teachers. My focus is on the administrators, the instructional support staff, and all of those people. Those D and F schools did not get there by themselves. They — at some point teachers were not getting the support they needed, teachers were not getting the [professional development] they needed, teachers were not getting what they needed to be effective in those classrooms. And the reason I’m looking at district-wide, the support staff is not going to be just for that one D or F school; the support staff is district-wide, and that’s the reasoning behind my focus.”
Ms. Newton’s logic probably seems reasonable. After all, LRSD has been a battlefield, recently, between dyslexia advocates and district-wide literacy administrators Sadie Mitchell, Veronica Perkins, and Sabrina Stout. The SBoE knows this, and probably wants to help end the conflict however it can.
Sabrina Stout, in particular, has been a point of contention since her DUI arrest last November. Her position (listed as “teacher” on her contract, although she’s listed as the director of elementary literacy in the LRSD phone directory) technically requires a valid Arkansas teaching license. However, Ms. Stout’s license expired on December 31, 2017. She was allowed to keep working without it until March 15, 2019, when she finally paid $75 to renew her license. Does this mean she is going to continue teaching with LRSD? Or is she getting ready to go job-hunting elsewhere?
The bigger question is: Will these administrators who are forced to leave LRSD (Karen James is another recent example) have the courage and freedom to tell us what they know from their time in the inner circle?
When teachers get fired under a waiver of Fair Dismissal, they get booted out the door unceremoniously, without severance pay, explanation, or recourse. However, when administrators get fired — even under a TFDA waiver — they usually have a golden parachute in the form of dirty secrets they can threaten to release if the district doesn’t buy their silence.
Even though public schools can’t enforce non-disclosure agreements, they still manage to silence departing administrators (and other liabilities) with hush money. I’ve already written about Heather Holaway’s settlement agreement where she got $28,000 in exchange for her promise not to make “disparaging statements (whether true or not)” about Haas Hall Academy.
I’ve also written about my own experience teaching at Arkansas Arts Academy, where our principal, Barbara Padgett, was forced to resign a week into the school year. The school’s attorney in that action, George Spence, pointed out that Ms. Padgett surely knew the school was exempt from the TFDA — and had likely even “participated in terminating employees without the application of the ATFDA.” Still, in exchange for Barbara Padgett’s silence, Arkansas Arts Academy agreed to continue paying her salary for another 15 months, plus pay for all her accrued sick and vacation days.
Barbara Padgett signed her General Release and non-disparagement agreement on August 25, 2017. In January 2018, she took over as superintendent at another public charter school, Ozark Montessori.
Under Ms. Padgett’s guidance, Ozark Montessori soon surrendered its charter in order to be taken over by LISA Academy, a Gulenist charter school currently expanding into northwest Arkansas from its foothold in Little Rock. Gulenist charter schools are notorious for their prosperity-gospel approach to combining Islam with corporate profiteering.
It’s nice to see the state of Arkansas finally opening its arms to religious diversity, but I remain adamantly opposed to our government intertwining itself with any religion in our public schools.
We will never know exactly what goes on inside LISA Academies as long as our current trend toward school privatization and financial secrecy continues.
Of course, a district doesn’t have to fire administrators to buy their silence.It can always just give them a raise, then send them to another school district.
In 2015, the LREA represented a group of employees at Henderson Middle School (LRSD) in a joint grievanceagainst Principal Frank Williams. Reading that grievance gives insight into the ongoing discipline issues at Henderson, which I have written about previously. You can also find Mr. Williams here, in the same scandalous Ashley Madison database where Rep. Mark Lowery likes to spend his campaign money.
At the time of the joint LREA grievance, Mr. Williams’ salary was $87,684.00. By the time he resigned last year, Mr. Williams’ salary was $93,072.00, with an additional $4,046 in stipends and a car allowance.
This year, Frank Williams is an administrator in St. Louis’ Ferguson-Florissant School District.
Still, even if administrators are being paid off and teachers are too scared of losing their jobs to speak out, parents can always advocate for their kids, right? Not when LRSD sends their school “Safety and Security” officers to students’ homes to offer bribes to parents, or threaten them with taking their kids away as I’ve seen in an ongoing lawsuit against the district.
This lawsuit alleges that Isaac Davis, a former University of Arkansas Razorback, physically abused special education students and forced them to fight each other in classroom 45 at Henderson Middle School. It also describes a deliberate cover-up and anti-whistleblowing campaign that began with Principal Frank Williams, continued through former Superintendent Baker Kurrus, and ultimately reached Education Commissioner Johnny Key.
Ultimately, after proof of Isaac Davis’ abuse of children finally surfaced, LRSD allowed him to resign with dignity, rather than firing him and filing criminal charges.
How do we hold our public schools accountable when they would rather spend our money to hide problems than to fix them? It’s particularly bad for Little Rock School District, because they don’t have a school board that we can flip on Election Day.
Everything in LRSD boils down to one man: Education Commissioner Johnny Key.
Key’s lawyer at the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE,) Lori Freno, has already argued that Johnny Key heads the ADE, but not (legally speaking) the LRSD. Therefore, she says, Johnny Key is not the “employer” of any LRSD employee, and can’t be held accountable for things that happen in the Little Rock School District.
Well, Ms. Freno. If Johnny Key (as the one-man school board for LRSD) is not the employer of every LRSD employee, then who is? As Spiderman reminds us, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s time for Johnny Key (and his employer, Governor Asa Hutchinson) to face his responsibilities, rather than sweeping them under the rug.