Ms. Peebles, At the Board meeting on August 10, 2004, the district's general counsel, Mr. Giles (I presume) stated that the reassignment / realignment of teachers was an administrative decision, not a board decision. You are now the top administrator. The board took no action to affirm or to overturn the realignment of 140 elementary teachers who hold multiple teaching licenses and have been employed with the district for 5 to 35 years. That passes the buck to you, and also leaves opens the door for you to act, in my opinion.
The MPS administration under David Jennings fired probationary teachers from special Ed classrooms rather than from areas in order to create a pretext for reassigning elementary teachers who are near the top of the seniority list and pay scale. According to a press release dated August 10, 2004, 140 elementary school teachers were "realigned" into other areas to create openings for 92 other tenured, elementary teachers. Such action is clearly not required by the law, even by the district's own interpretation of the Teacher Tenure Act and Stand decision. The firing of some special education teachers also put the district at risk of losing Medicaid funding, because some the teachers who were realigned to special Ed classes cannot provide a safe environment for all of their students and are replacing teachers that were equipped to do so. Due to the illegal character of the realignment process I recommend that you hire back all of the special Ed teachers and restore all of the realigned elementary teachers to their positions. If there are some low-seniority, tenured elementary teachers who will be without employment as a result of the corrective action recommend in this letter, I propose that they be offered compensation for lost wages, plus assistance to retrain for jobs in high needs areas so they may be rehired by the 2005-2006 school year. -Doug Mann, King Field Mann for School Board www.educationright.com - REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
