A 2013 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that bars unions at the Pulaski County Special School District from suing the state Department of Education for terminating their contracts also bars them from continuing litigation against the district in an effort to restore the unions' negotiating authority, a judge ruled Tuesday.
The Education Department claimed sovereign immunity shielded it from the litigation, and the high court agreed in 2013. Pulaski County schools get the benefit from the court's other rulings in the decision that the agency's order to the district to cancel the unions' authority to serve as bargaining agents was legal, the district's attorney, Sam Jones, told Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza.
"The Supreme Court has already found what the [education] commissioner did was valid and within his statutory authority," Jones said. "The Supreme Court has spoken. The school district must comply."
Piazza has no authority to countermand the high court's findings, Jones said, an argument with which the judge agreed after a 23-minute hearing. A formal written order will be filed later. Piazza said he expects an appeal by the unions -- the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers and the Pulaski Association of Support Staff -- which had represented bargaining-eligible teachers and staff members.
The district signed new contracts in December 2010, recognizing the two associations as the groups representing most of its employees for negotiating personnel policies. Five months later, the state found the school system to be in fiscal distress, dissolving the School Board and replacing the superintendent. In a cost-saving effort, the district tried to renegotiate contracts with the unions but couldn't reach an agreement.
In response, then-Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell ordered the district to cancel the contracts and stop recognizing the unions as the negotiating representatives of teachers and staff. The unions sued the agency and the district the next month, May 2012. The lawsuits were dismissed against the Education Department, a decision upheld on appeal by the high court in September 2013.
Union attorney Clayton Blackstock argued that Piazza still had the authority to decide whether the district was in the wrong because of the nature of the district's defense to the lawsuit, that it had no choice to terminate the union contracts because it was ordered to do so by the commissioner.
He said that argument allows Piazza to probe the motives of the school district to determine whether the district acted in good faith when it suggested renegotiating the contracts to the commissioner as a means of saving the district money. Blackstock told the judge the district could show no savings but took the opportunity to ask the commissioner to terminate the agreements to wipe away 30 years' worth of union gains.
"They're actually setting it up so they don't have to honor the contract," he said of the district.
Metro on 04/22/2015