Teacher and support-staff unions in the Pulaski County Special School District are asking the courts to block the state and school district from the wholesale ending of unionnegotiated contracts.
Clayton Blackstock, an attorney for the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers and the Pulaski Association of Support Staff, sent the requests for what he called “limited” preliminary injunctions against the state and district to Pulaski County Circuit Judges Mary McGowan and Wendell Griffen.
The injunction requests are limited in that they do not attempt to preserve certain benefits in the contracts that pose an expense to the district, but they do seek to keep collective bargaining rights and what the attorney said are other nonmonetary provisions of the contracts.
The two judges are presiding in separate lawsuits filed earlier this year by the unions and some of their individual members to save their unionnegotiated contracts and their collective bargaining rights.
The 17,000-student school district, the third largest in the state, has been classified by the state as fiscally distressed because of a recent history of mismanagement and overspending. The district is operating under state control, with a state-appointed superintendent and no locally elected school board.
In April, Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell directed Superintendent Jerry Guess to end recognition of the unions for both teachers and support staff, and to terminate the union-negotiated contracts.
The state directive was done as part of an effort to cut an overall $11 million in district expenses this coming fiscal year to get spending in line with revenue. About $4 million in cuts will come from employee benefits and pay, such as a two-day reduction in what was a 192-day teacher work year.
The motions for preliminary injunctions - one filed Thursday and one filed Friday - come just a little more than a week before the June 30 termination of the contracts. The motions for injunction add a sense of some urgency to the arguments in the initial lawsuits.
Blackstock said in an interview Friday that it is important to have the injunctions “before the beginning of school in August, as quickly as possible.”
The motion for the injunction to preserve the union-negotiated contract for the teachers notes that the plaintiffs are not asking to stop the implementation of the eight changes in the contract that state and district leaders identified as necessary to help resolve the district’s financial problems.
Those eight contract changes include the elimination of two teacher workdays, the elimination of a teacherattendance incentive, the elimination of “severance” pay for retiring teachers and the phaseout of teacher salary credit for district-taught courses instead of college courses.
“The plaintiffs do seek an injunction to keep the remaining portions of the [contract] intact,” Blackstock wrote.
“The termination of the [contract] wipes out numerous terms and conditions of the teachers’ contracts that ensure teachers will be treated fairly.”
Blackstock said the state Department of Education acted “ultra vires” or outside its authority in directing the district to end recognition of the unions and terminate the entire union-negotiated contracts, also known as the Professional Negotiations Agreement.
He said the state agency only has the authority to direct the alteration of the district’s fiscal policies - not its nonmonetary policies. Those nonmonetary provisions include the district’s agreement to recognize the unions as bargaining agents for the employees.
Guess, the district’s superintendent, disagreed Friday with Blackstock’s arguments.
“We have always felt that what we did was consistent with the law,” Guess said. “We believe that we have acted in this case consistent with what statutes guide us to do.
“We also believe that what Dr. Kimbrell did was consistent with the authority granted him under the statutes,” Guess said.
Blackstock said the employee associations and their members would suffer without the injunctions. He said the teachers union will no longer have a right to represent its members in district matters. The association’s leaders will no longer have the right to meet with the superintendent monthly, and the president will no longer have the right to a leave of absence to focus entirely on leading the union. The association won’t be able to use school bulletin boards or school mailboxes to communicate with its members.
The individual plaintiffs, he said, will no longer have a defined workday, a restricted workload, a defined teacher evaluation procedure, a multistepped grievance procedure, or a teacher advisory committee to address teacher concerns, among other provisions in the contract.
“The rights are valuable; the harm intangible and irreparable,” Blackstock wrote.
McGowan is the presiding judge in a lawsuit filed earlier by the teachers union and its members against the Arkansas Department of Education, the school district, and the members of the district’s Personnel Policies Committee for certified staff.
The lawsuit, which is awaiting a hearing date, challenges the legality of the state and district actions to terminate the union-negotiated contract that is not due to expire until 2015.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/23/2012