Lunchroom supervision has recently become an issue in our district. Some elementary buildings seem to be making a move to have teachers eat lunch with their students in an effort to emulate the very successful Eat, Exercise, Excel program instituted by the staff at Anthony Elementary. This a situation that has been clearly defined by the professional negotiations act (PN Act) as well as by three separate Kansas Supreme Court rulings.
In a nutshell, lunchroom supervision, which includes having students eat in a classroom, is voluntary by virtue of the fact that is has been defined as a supplemental duty, distinct and separate from our primary teaching contract. The law also requires that remuneration for supplemental duties must be bargained.
Below is information from Lily Kober, our UniServ director:
The PN Act references supplemental duties as a mandatory subject of bargaining.
The case law is from the Kansas Supreme Court decisions: Swager, Swanson and Hachiya-Livingston.
Swager was the first. It was the case that drew a bright line between primary contracts and supplemental contracts and the fact that supplementals cannot be linked to the primary job.
Swanson was the case that determined that bargaining teams could not bargain away an individual’s right to turn down a supplemental.
Hachiya-Livingston clarified that supplementals are determined by the nature of the work and not when the work occurred.
So, just because the work, lunchroom supervision, occurs during the duty day, they still cannot force teachers to do it. The PN Act clearly lists lunchroom supervision as an example of a supplemental duty.
Below are listed the case names and numbers of the three cases:
Swager v. Board of Education USD 412
Kan. App. 2d 648 (1984)
USD 241 v. Swanson
11 Kan App. 2d 171 (1986)
Hachiya v USD 307
242 Kan. 572, 750 P. 2d 383
(This case actually involves two teachers - Robert Hachiya and Cheri Livingston - so you may see reference to the Livingston name.)
The PN Law referred to above is the Professional Negotiations Act, KSA 72-5413. Item "o" under the definitions section says:
(o) "Supplemental contracts" means contracts for employment duties other than those services covered in the principal or primary contract of employment of the professional employee, and shall include but not be limited to such services as coaching, supervising, directing and assisting extracurricular activities, chaperoning, ticket taking, lunchroom supervision, and other similar and related activities.
The fact that the above types of activities are considered mandatory subjects of bargaining means that a school district cannot unilaterally set policy regarding these activities. Supplemental contracts are voluntary, and pay for the supplemental activities must be negotiated by the two parties.
A “lunchroom,” by the way, does not necessarily have to be a cafeteria. It could be a classroom within which students eat.
As always, if you have specific questions about this information, please e-mail us: lneanews@gmail.com
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Food for Thought
From the back page of this week's NEWSWEEK:
THE LAST WORD
Anna Quindlen
Write and Wrong
A teacher who is psyched about engaging struggling students learns that bureaucracy is more important than pedagogy.
Jul 21, 2008 Issue
Each year in the state of Indiana, librarians, teachers and students compile a list of 20 nominated books for the Eliot Rosewater Award, named after a character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, a native of the state. This year one finalist was "The Freedom Writers Diary," which makes even more bizarre what happened to Connie Heermann, tossed from her classroom for trying to use that same book as a teaching tool.
In the months since Heermann was placed on an 18-month suspension without pay by the school board in Perry Township, her case has been ballyhooed as errant censorship. But it's really a cautionary tale about what's too often the ruling principle in American public education: the timidity and inefficiency of powerful bureaucracies far removed from the daily lives of either teachers or kids.
A bit about "The Freedom Writers Diary": the book grew out of the work of Erin Gruwell, who was once a newbie teacher in a class of at-risk students in California. "At risk" is edu-code: it most often means the students in question are poor, minority, have chaotic home lives, are likely to drop out. Gruwell decided that the road to success for her students was to get them to write their lives. They kept diaries about everything from self-doubt to incest to gang membership. Some of the students used profanity and racial slurs, but a reader notices that as their writing improves, that disappears. As Gruwell says, "As they wrote more, they made better choices." They also had better lives. The students in Gruwell's classes started out believing they might not survive high school—literally. By the end of the book, they're heading to college.
Which brings us back to Heermann, whose students at Perry Meridian High School were not much different from the ones in the diary and who she hoped would see their struggles—and their potential—within its pages. After attending a training session last summer with Gruwell, she came home psyched. She persuaded a local businessman to pay for 150 copies of "The Freedom Writers Diary," but her principal asked her to hold off using it until the central office could take a look. That's unusual—most teachers use materials other than approved textbooks in their classes, and Heermann had done so before—but she started the year with John Grisham's "The Street Lawyer" instead. A lawyer visited the classroom, and students wrote letters to the author. "My kids were loving it," Heermann says. "They were even reading ahead." The engagement that had led Gruwell's students to success in school was in full flower, and Heermann decided it was time for empowerment, and the diary.
Here are the bare facts of what happened next: Heermann sent out permission slips to parents, virtually all of whom signed them. She informed the central office that she would be distributing the books on Nov. 15, and did. Almost immediately she was told to collect the books, and to keep a list of the names of those who did not comply. Most of the kids refused to hand over their copies. And before you could say "free exchange of ideas," Heermann was told that if she didn't resign, she would be fired.
Did I mention that she'd been teaching for 27 years, and that she paid for all those copies of the Grisham book herself?
It's hard to unearth exactly why someone was so hell bent on keeping "The Freedom Writers Diary" out of this classroom. Maybe it was the use of a particular racial slur, the one that keeps getting people riled about "Huckleberry Finn" and that provides the perfect teachable moment for discussing racial divisions in America—at least if you're not paralyzed by cowardice. You have to wonder whether the school-board members even read the book. Maybe they never made it to the entry by the student who said, "Who would have thought of the 'at risk' kids making it this far? But we did, even though the educational system desperately tried to hold us down." It's a they said/she said situation, difficult to parse because so much took place behind closed doors. The board lawyer said Heermann was told not to use the book and she did so anyhow. She says after months of silence from higher-ups, she assumed they just didn't care.
If the school board of Perry Township wanted to counter "The Freedom Writers Diary," it certainly did. The book teaches that open discussion about challenging subjects is always best, that engagement always trumps silence. The members of that board were outraged by alleged insubordination when they should have been outraged by the glacial pace of decision-making by their top administrators. Insubordination is what built this country, and a glacial pace in education means you lose kids.
Have I mentioned that it's hard to get really good people to become teachers?
Connie Heermann will be teaching three courses in the fall at a local community college. She'll be making less than $5,000, but she's grateful for the opportunity. She was forbidden to contact her students after her job was yanked out from under her, was forced to go overnight from a powerful presence in their lives to a complete cipher. What made it worse was that she knows they are kids who assume they'll get the shaft. That's what "at risk" means, too. She hears that some stopped going to class. It looks as though her students are not going to wind up the way Erin Gruwell's did. That makes her so sad, but she doesn't regret what she did. "You know what?" she says. "My students have the book. They kept the book!" And then her voice breaks.
© 2008
THE LAST WORD
Anna Quindlen
Write and Wrong
A teacher who is psyched about engaging struggling students learns that bureaucracy is more important than pedagogy.
Jul 21, 2008 Issue
Each year in the state of Indiana, librarians, teachers and students compile a list of 20 nominated books for the Eliot Rosewater Award, named after a character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, a native of the state. This year one finalist was "The Freedom Writers Diary," which makes even more bizarre what happened to Connie Heermann, tossed from her classroom for trying to use that same book as a teaching tool.
In the months since Heermann was placed on an 18-month suspension without pay by the school board in Perry Township, her case has been ballyhooed as errant censorship. But it's really a cautionary tale about what's too often the ruling principle in American public education: the timidity and inefficiency of powerful bureaucracies far removed from the daily lives of either teachers or kids.
A bit about "The Freedom Writers Diary": the book grew out of the work of Erin Gruwell, who was once a newbie teacher in a class of at-risk students in California. "At risk" is edu-code: it most often means the students in question are poor, minority, have chaotic home lives, are likely to drop out. Gruwell decided that the road to success for her students was to get them to write their lives. They kept diaries about everything from self-doubt to incest to gang membership. Some of the students used profanity and racial slurs, but a reader notices that as their writing improves, that disappears. As Gruwell says, "As they wrote more, they made better choices." They also had better lives. The students in Gruwell's classes started out believing they might not survive high school—literally. By the end of the book, they're heading to college.
Which brings us back to Heermann, whose students at Perry Meridian High School were not much different from the ones in the diary and who she hoped would see their struggles—and their potential—within its pages. After attending a training session last summer with Gruwell, she came home psyched. She persuaded a local businessman to pay for 150 copies of "The Freedom Writers Diary," but her principal asked her to hold off using it until the central office could take a look. That's unusual—most teachers use materials other than approved textbooks in their classes, and Heermann had done so before—but she started the year with John Grisham's "The Street Lawyer" instead. A lawyer visited the classroom, and students wrote letters to the author. "My kids were loving it," Heermann says. "They were even reading ahead." The engagement that had led Gruwell's students to success in school was in full flower, and Heermann decided it was time for empowerment, and the diary.
Here are the bare facts of what happened next: Heermann sent out permission slips to parents, virtually all of whom signed them. She informed the central office that she would be distributing the books on Nov. 15, and did. Almost immediately she was told to collect the books, and to keep a list of the names of those who did not comply. Most of the kids refused to hand over their copies. And before you could say "free exchange of ideas," Heermann was told that if she didn't resign, she would be fired.
Did I mention that she'd been teaching for 27 years, and that she paid for all those copies of the Grisham book herself?
It's hard to unearth exactly why someone was so hell bent on keeping "The Freedom Writers Diary" out of this classroom. Maybe it was the use of a particular racial slur, the one that keeps getting people riled about "Huckleberry Finn" and that provides the perfect teachable moment for discussing racial divisions in America—at least if you're not paralyzed by cowardice. You have to wonder whether the school-board members even read the book. Maybe they never made it to the entry by the student who said, "Who would have thought of the 'at risk' kids making it this far? But we did, even though the educational system desperately tried to hold us down." It's a they said/she said situation, difficult to parse because so much took place behind closed doors. The board lawyer said Heermann was told not to use the book and she did so anyhow. She says after months of silence from higher-ups, she assumed they just didn't care.
If the school board of Perry Township wanted to counter "The Freedom Writers Diary," it certainly did. The book teaches that open discussion about challenging subjects is always best, that engagement always trumps silence. The members of that board were outraged by alleged insubordination when they should have been outraged by the glacial pace of decision-making by their top administrators. Insubordination is what built this country, and a glacial pace in education means you lose kids.
Have I mentioned that it's hard to get really good people to become teachers?
Connie Heermann will be teaching three courses in the fall at a local community college. She'll be making less than $5,000, but she's grateful for the opportunity. She was forbidden to contact her students after her job was yanked out from under her, was forced to go overnight from a powerful presence in their lives to a complete cipher. What made it worse was that she knows they are kids who assume they'll get the shaft. That's what "at risk" means, too. She hears that some stopped going to class. It looks as though her students are not going to wind up the way Erin Gruwell's did. That makes her so sad, but she doesn't regret what she did. "You know what?" she says. "My students have the book. They kept the book!" And then her voice breaks.
© 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Welcome New Teachers!
Welcome to Leavenworth Public Schools!
Leavenworth NEA congratulates all new teachers for choosing a great place to work. USD 453’s teachers and staff are among the most caring and professional individuals around. We know you’ll be happy here!
Representatives of LNEA will be hosting lunch for teachers new to the district on August 6 at Central Office, and will be presenting information about the benefits of membership.
Whether you're a prospective member or have been with us for a long time, please take some time now to consider the benefits of belonging to our teachers’ association!
* News, practical information and teaching tips
* A professional network of colleagues
* Staff development opportunities
* Liability insurance protection and legal assistance
* Local teacher rights resources
* A voice in the Kansas legislature
* Personal financial advice and a great discount program
For more details on the benefits of membership, check out the Kansas-NEA website: ks.nea.org
If you have questions about NEA please call:
Linda Schukman - 913-727-5141
Ginger Riddle - 913-727-2617
Or e-mail: lneanews@gmail.com
Leavenworth NEA congratulates all new teachers for choosing a great place to work. USD 453’s teachers and staff are among the most caring and professional individuals around. We know you’ll be happy here!
Representatives of LNEA will be hosting lunch for teachers new to the district on August 6 at Central Office, and will be presenting information about the benefits of membership.
Whether you're a prospective member or have been with us for a long time, please take some time now to consider the benefits of belonging to our teachers’ association!
* News, practical information and teaching tips
* A professional network of colleagues
* Staff development opportunities
* Liability insurance protection and legal assistance
* Local teacher rights resources
* A voice in the Kansas legislature
* Personal financial advice and a great discount program
For more details on the benefits of membership, check out the Kansas-NEA website: ks.nea.org
If you have questions about NEA please call:
Linda Schukman - 913-727-5141
Ginger Riddle - 913-727-2617
Or e-mail: lneanews@gmail.com
Monday, July 7, 2008
KanTell Survey Results
Hello once again!
KNEA has posted a link to the results of the survey that we took last winter. The survey deals with teachers' opinions of time, staff development, leadership, staff development, facilities and mentor programs. Results are posted only for schools that had a 40% or greater participation. It is interesting information:
http://www.kantell.org/reports/index.php
Just copy and paste the address into your web browser.
KNEA has posted a link to the results of the survey that we took last winter. The survey deals with teachers' opinions of time, staff development, leadership, staff development, facilities and mentor programs. Results are posted only for schools that had a 40% or greater participation. It is interesting information:
http://www.kantell.org/reports/index.php
Just copy and paste the address into your web browser.
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