Recent court ruling makes a major change in School Law | Eastern North Carolina Now

    The N. C. Court of Appeals (COA) handed down a decision last week (12-17-13) in the case of Joyner vs. Perquimans County Board of Education that may become a landmark decision in North Carolina School Law. The court ruled that the Perquimans County Board of Education acted arbitrarily and capriciously in denying Vanessa Joyner career status in 2012. It did so by upholding the Superior Court's order that Ms. Joyner be reinstated with back pay and benefits.

    You can read the decision by clicking here.

    It should be noted before going any further that the law on teacher tenure was changed by the Legislature to eliminate "career status" or tenure. But that does not diminish the ruling in this case because the holding of the COA turned on procedural due process rights, regardless of whether career status was involved. Presumably, the standard articulated in this decision, if not overturned by an appeal to the Supreme Court, would apply to the "non-renewal" of a teacher's contract under the new law.

    Here's the crux of what happened. Joyner had completed four years of service with good evaluations. She was recommended for career status by her principal and former principal as well as the superintendent. But the board voted to deny her tenure because a single member of the board question whether she was doing a good job or not. He based that conclusion on his own personal investigation and things he heard from others. There was evidence that his perception could have been tainted because Joyner had blown the whistle on the board member's wife, who was a teacher in the same school. In short there was little or no evidence in the record to show that Joyner was not a satisfactory teacher.

    The trial judge and the COA found that the board acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner and abused its discretion. In short, the record did not contain sufficient evidence of Joyner's unsatisfactory performance, only the "feeling" of an "untrained" school board member.

    Commentary

    This decision is a major change in North Carolina School Law. Heretofore, school administrators and school board members have been taught that a school board could non-renew a teacher's contract for "any reason it deems sufficient..." Moreover, the law has been that the board does not have to even afford a hearing on the matter.

    What has changed is that the COA has more clearly defined the standard a school board must demonstrate before it non-renews a teacher's contract. That standard is now sufficient evidence in the record to support such a decision as not being arbitrary, capricious, discriminatory or an abuse of discretion.

    In light of the new law eliminating tenure and replacing it with renewable contracts the decision could be extremely significant.

    Beyond the esoteric legal issues here, what this case illustrates is what we have been saying ever since the Legislature started down this road of eliminating tenure. The real problem here was inappropriate behavior by a school board member who tried to play principal and superintendent. And the remainder of the board went along with it. This case shows very clearly that "the problem" in the tenure debate has not focused sufficiently on the very real threat from school board members who abuse their authority and power. Fortunately the COA corrected this in the Perquimans case but that is not sufficient. The Legislature should now go back and tweak the new law to keep that from happening.

    And I think the solution to this problem would be very simple. Individual school board members should be personally liable for violating a teacher's rights. The teacher ought to be able to sue, and if the school system loses the board members who caused the action should have to pay all of the legal bills for both sides, unless they can show they were acting upon competent legal advice.

    No competent School Law Attorney would have told the Perquimans Board of Education that it could/should non-renew any contract because an individual school board member had "heard" the teacher was not doing a good job and took it upon himself to conduct his own private "investigation" of the teacher's performance.

    Teacher tenure gets a bum rap from legislators seeking to pander for votes and ignorant people who simply don't know what goes on in schools (and closed school board sessions). We've said it before and we'll say it again, as this case illustrates: Tenure should not be eliminated until school board members are held just as accountable as they seek to hold teachers.

    And this is true nowhere more than it is right here in Beaufort County. The Beaufort County Board of Education has one of the worst records of violating teacher's rights of any in the state. Hopefully that is being corrected, but whether it's true or not under the current administration and school board leadership remains to be seen. But that does not change the past and that past in Beaufort County has numerous examples of abuse of discretion by our school board. Just search our site for "Eastern Elementary" to see what I mean.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.
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