Arkansas generally requires its teachers to hold valid teaching licenses. This helps keep professional standards high, and allows for the Professional Licensure Standards Board (PLSB) to intervene when teachers commit major ethics violations like being constantly drunk at work, mismanaging public money, or having inappropriate relationships with underage students.
There are a few different paths to teacher licensure. Frequently, college Education majors graduate with their teaching licenses already in place. Arkansas also allows highly-qualified teacher candidates to apply for provisional licenses and non-traditional licenses when they wish to become teachers after building their careers in other fields.
Unfortunately, our legislators increasingly believe teachers don’t need licenses at all. Under the powerful influence of billionaires who are trying to destroy public education, Arkansas lobbyists and politicians have developed ways for teachers to work without a license of any kind. They believe:
Requiring teachers to be licensed backfires not only by reducing the average competence of the pool. . . . By far, the most effective way to improve teacher quality is to require administrators to selectively retain, after the first few years of experience, only the more effective teachers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/omribenshahar/2017/07/21/teacher-certification-makes-public-school-education-worse-not-better/#485707c3730f
To this end, Arkansas makes it easy for schools to sidestep statutory teacher licensure requirements entirely. 369 schools in Arkansas (including some in LRSD) currently hold waivers from the teacher licensure law. Even when schools don’t have a “teacher licensure” waiver, the Arkansas Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) allows schools to hire unqualified teachers if administrators declare an emergency.
The (Fake) Emergency in Little Rock
On September 4, 2019, LRSD’s Coordinator of Certified Personnel, Renee Kovach, declared a state of emergency in Little Rock. She needed to justify the district’s decision to hire dozens of unlicensed teachers. On behalf of LRSD, Ms. Kovach submitted 34 requests to the DESE for “Emergency Teaching Permits” so that unlicensed people (who were already teaching in LRSD) could legally continue to teach (for up to two years) without a waiver of state law.
When I asked what constituted an “emergency,” DESE’s Operations Manager (Legal Services) Brittany Kincaid explained, “The [Emergency Teaching Permit] section of the licensure rules is 7-2.0. Under current rules, justification is not required for the ETP.”
The [Emergency Teaching Permit] section of the licensure rules is 7-2.0. Under current rules, justification is not required for the ETP.
Brittany Kincaid, Operations Director, DESE LEGAL SERVICES
Basically, “Emergency Teaching Permits” are a way to get around existing rules for hiring unlicensed, long-term substitute teachers. If LRSD admitted that their 34 ETP hires were essentially long-term subs, ineligible for permanent employment as teachers in Arkansas, Renee Kovach would have had to document a lack of properly-licensed applicants for the positions.
Of course, LRSD couldn’t meet these requirements for justifying their decision to hire unlicensed, long-term subs. There was no emergency. Several qualified, licensed applicants had applied for these teaching jobs. So why did LRSD insist upon hiring unlicensed teachers?
This way, LRSD gets total control over 34 teachers who have no license to apply for work anywhere else. These unlicensed teachers are not bound by the ethical standards of the PLSB, so no ethics board has any power to strip them of their careers for egregiously unprofessional behavior — as long as they keep their bosses happy.
Handy, right? If you want to treat your teachers unprofessionally, hire teachers who aren’t professionals.
Because of Renee Kovach’s alleged emergency, LRSD got to hire Jonathan Green, the son of Shelia Hayes (Director of Educational Services at the corrupt Tendaji program at St. Mark Baptist Church.)
(NOTE: A previous version of this post conflated Jonathan Green and Jeremy Green (brothers) by posting Jeremy Green’s termination letter from LRSD as a link from his brother’s name. It is Jeremy D. Green, not Jonathan Green, who has had felony theft & drug charges dropped twice in the past year, thanks to Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley’s “nolle prosequi” decisions. Larry Jegley’s sister is Paula Korte, the LRSD SPED teacher who failed to report child maltreatment in Classroom 45 at Henderson Middle School — so you can see how tight the web is woven.)
LRSD also promoted Falloncia Earnest, a paraprofessional who is implicated in the deliberate mismanagement of federal money at Mabelvale Middle School — at nearly twice her salary from last year — to teach Social Studies.
| Standard License | 6 |
| Non-Traditional (APPEL) License | 3 |
| Provisional License | 3 |
| No License (Falloncia Earnest) | 1 |
13 people applied to teach Social Studies at Mabelvale Middle School last summer. 12 of them had teaching licenses. LRSD hired the only unlicensed applicant: Falloncia Earnest.
Makes you wonder. . .
What makes Falloncia Earnest so valuable?
Falloncia Earnest is one of the trio of LRSD employees who were caught on surveillance video destroying documents immediately after Rhonda Hall was placed on administrative leave for assaulting a student at Mabelvale Middle School earlier this year.
Ms. Earnest is a paraprofessional who represents herself as a Special Education Teacher on social media. She has not passed her Praxis test, nor does she have any kind of licensure in education.
However, Falloncia Earnest goes to the right church. She’s willing to drop by her school’s front office while she’s “off contract,” unlock someone else’s filing cabinet, remove documents, lie to a security guard, and keep her mouth shut about the inflation of student attendance records if it means Mabelvale continues to qualify for federal welfare money.
Sounds like Governor Asa Hutchinson’s favorite sort of public employee. I can see why he’d make a licensure exception for Falloncia Earnest — just like he made an exception for Education Commissioner Johnny Key.
Even though LRSD parents have been very clear about the quality they demand from their school district, Asa Hutchinson prefers to hire unqualified people to do important work — as long as they keep their mouths shut about the corruption behind closed doors.
I don’t understand what is wrong with hiring Jonathan Green. You spoke on his mother and brother but what has he done “wrong?” This is lazy journalism and I hope you can do better in the future.
I don’t know Jonathan Green, but the fact that he is being hired instead of licensed teachers suggests that he is getting preferential treatment from LRSD. That makes sense, since the LRSD grants director is on the board of his mom’s nonprofit, and the LRSD Chief Financial Officer’s brother is on the board with her.
Family names among these unlicensed teachers (Burton is in there, too) suggest that ETP’s are being used to implement nepotistic hiring practices, in violation of LRSD’s policies. And the fact that MOST of these ETP (unlicensed) teachers are deployed in “failing” schools suggests that LRSD administrators (including Johnny Key) do NOT want to see the learning at these schools improve.
The Green/Hayes family is getting special treatment from Pulaski County law enforcement (Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley,) too. Reinforces the LRSD/LRPD link, and helps illustrate the school-to-prison pipeline for children of color.
So you say what’s wrong with hiring an unlicensed person from off the street? Would you want just anyone teaching your child and all they have is the answer key? They can’t even answer critical thinking questions if a student indeed do have a question about something. Umm? That just might be a good question to ask yourself. Let’s just try to make sense from your none sense…Welp, nope still I can’t make out anything that you are trying to say other than……Maybe Mr.Green taught you and look at the end results…simply illiterate. That’s not how I would want my child growing up and graduating with an actual below average score rather than being taught from someone who well qualified for the job. Matter of fact how about you allow me to school you on the difference between having a licence and not having one. So would you want a unlicensed “SO CALLED” substitute physician to perform surgery on you? Or prescribe any kind of medicine that was possibly googled (or guessed) and given to you? I think not, so before posting illiterate questions about why can’t someone do anything without a license do your research on both side. When it comes to a child education, don’t just throw an unqualified person in a qualified position to do the work. This is why our kids are failing and so behind, bc all that is given to them is printed out worksheet from edhelper.com… The bible say the people perish from the lack of knowledge. Why just have wisdom and lack the understanding and the knowledge…..they all go hand and hand….duh…. if you need more understanding please reply and I can further help you with your illiterate self, so back off of Elizabeth, before we start using BIG WORDS that you might not understand, other than AEIOU and sometimes Y.
This grant money has Asa Hutchinson’s hands giving funds to some of everybody