Mike Poore’s Message to Staff Following the LRSD Teacher Strike of 2019
The six Little Rock School District (LRSD) staff members who got suspended earlier this month have suffered too much already, so I won’t name them here. Major local news outlets have attempted to shame them by publishing their names, the schools at which they work, and LRSD’s assertion that they “violated district policy” and committed a “breach of professional ethics” with their actions and words related to the one-day teacher strike last November.
The “district policy” is ridiculous, and these six staff members were 100% professional. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, I want to ask:
Why These Six, Specifically?
In a district as diverse as LRSD, are we supposed to believe that these six staff members — who share a statistically unlikely set of common characteristics — are really the baddest actors of all the teachers who went on strike? Or are they just the easiest, most strategic targets for a state-controlled district that uses fear and other underhanded, union-busting tactics to control their teachers?
All six of these suspended staff members are white. None of them work in schools that have been assigned “F” grades by the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE.) All six of these suspended staff members work in elementary schools.
LRSD picked these six scapegoats because they are trying to instill maximum fear with minimum risk. If LRSD had suspended teachers of color, they might be accused of racism. If LRSD had suspended teachers at a “failing” school, they might be accused of denying instruction time to students who are already lagging behind. And if LRSD had suspended high school teachers, their students (as we’ve already seen, with the student “sick out” last October) might take action to protect their teachers.
LRSD suspended six “white” women who work at elementary schools that aren’t “failing” because publicly shaming these specific people will best serve the state’s agenda of suppressing teacher speech.
What, Exactly, Did They Do Wrong?
Four of these staff members used the ClassDojo app to send messages to the parents and guardians of their students. One made a post on her personal Facebook page. One, in her role as Vice-President of the Parent-Teacher Association at her own children’s school, gave a copy of the student directory (student names and parent contact info) to another parent, so that the PTA could contact parents in case of a teacher strike.
LRSD claimed that this PTA Vice-President (also a school nurse) released “confidential information” about students. Local news outlets repeated the “confidential information” phrase when they reported the story. However, federal law says that school directory information is NOT confidential because it “would not generally be considered harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed.” If the information isn’t “confidential,” then she didn’t do anything wrong by sharing it — right?
But what about the other five teachers? What did they actually write that got them suspended?
Here’s one of the teachers’ messages from ClassDojo:
Was she misrepresenting anything? No. Was she directing parents not to send their kids to school? No. Was she anything less than professional? Absolutely not. However, Superintendent Mike Poore claimed she wrote this message “for the purpose and intent of encouraging [parents] not to send students to school on November 14, 2019,” and said this message “directly interfered in the education of students.”
Mike Poore said the same thing about this Facebook post, published by another teacher on her personal page:
These teachers got suspended for three days, without pay. Their union representative, Karla Carpenter, decided not to appeal the suspension.* When I emailed Ms. Carpenter to ask why the union didn’t fight back, she (like most union representatives) declined to respond to my media request. However, it is common knowledge that dozens — if not hundreds — of other LRSD staff members participated in similar actions and speech, with regard to the November strike. Maybe the union just didn’t want to set a precedent of defending these six, if it meant they would have to defend hundreds of others down the road.
How Should Teachers Communicate if They Don’t Want to Get Punished?
Teachers have daily, direct experience with the policies and practices of public education, and the effect they have on students. Therefore, it is imperative that we protect teachers’ rights to speak in favor of the policies and practices they believe are best. However, it would certainly be unprofessional for a teacher to complain to her students, belittle her colleagues, or spend instructional time on her political actions.
The Professional Licensure Standards Board (PLSB) at the Department of Education should address the difference between appropriate and inappropriate types of teacher speech on social media. It should leave room for thoughtful, courteous, professional expressions of teachers’ informed, expert opinions — as long as this speech doesn’t happen during instructional time.
Instead, all Arkansas teachers are expected to exclude stakeholders from their political speech. They are forbidden to correspond with their students or their students’ parents, unless it is done for “professional and educational purposes,” and only from their official school accounts. (See section 5 of the Recommendations and Guidelines Regarding the Educational Applications of Social-Networking Technology, published by the PLSB.) It’s a ridiculous policy — impossible to implement objectively, and too broad to enforce — but it’s there to provide an excuse whenever a superintendent wants to make an example out of somebody.
Who Wrote This Ridiculous Policy Silencing Teachers?
The Arkansas Department of Education is part of the state’s executive branch of government. Their boss, Johnny Key, was directly appointed by Governor Asa Hutchinson. When they try to pull off dangerous, dictatorial stunts like this, it is a direct reflection of the governor’s dismissive attitude toward teachers and the democratic process.
Imagine if Hutchinson’s tyrannical policy were actually enforced, statewide. A teacher could lose her license if:
- She shared her cell phone number with students’ parents;
- She posted comments unrelated to education anywhere that stakeholders could possibly find them;
- She tweeted a picture of her classroom’s leaky roof from her personal Twitter account;
- She texted her students’ parents to warn them that a school bus driver had been arrested for drunk driving; or
- She failed to unfriend her sister on Facebook when her sister’s child enrolled in her school.
Come on. As a community, we want teachers to be available for communication. We want teachers to tell us when school facilities are dilapidated and dangerous. We want teachers to use their communication skills to build safety nets under our children, to build ladders of opportunity for our kids to climb, and to build bridges for us to cross when we come together in support of our schools.
When our governor makes bad policies that threaten our children by silencing their teachers, what is our responsibility?
* Update from LREA President Teresa Knapp Gordon: Neither Karla Carpenter nor any other AEA representative (except AEA president Carol Fleming) is “allowed to” respond to media requests. However, Ms. Gordon points out: “Only the member can make the decision to appeal or not.” This statement suggests it was not the union who decided against appealing these suspensions — rather, it was each, individual staff member who decided not to file an appeal.