New contracts mistakenly went out to all Little Rock School District employees Tuesday, even the ones whose contracts will not be renewed for the 2024-25 school year.
Superintendent Jermall Wright sent the following email districtwide to clarify:
Good afternoon LRSD Employees,
Due to human error, all current LRSD employees mistakenly received contracts for the 2024-25 school year today via an email from the TalentEd portal. All contracts sent today will be deleted and considered void after the deletion. Even if an employee digitally signed the contract received today, that digital signature and the contract itself will be voided once deleted.
We sincerely apologize for this grave and serious error and acknowledge the frustration this mistake has caused for many of our employees.
The heartbreaker of it is that not all district employees will be back at school come August.
LRSD staff told the Little Rock School Board last week that an estimated 100-200 of the district’s roughly 3,200 employees won’t see their contracts renewed for the upcoming school year.
These non-renewals are the district’s first round under the Arkansas LEARNS Act, a conservative overhaul of the state education system that rolls back longstanding teacher employment protections. It also sends public money to private schools in the form of vouchers, increases teacher starting salary to $50,000 across the state, and makes a long list of other changes.
Under Arkansas LEARNS, educators can see their contracts non-renewed at the end of a school year, and there’s not much they can do about it. LEARNS repealed the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, a 1983 law that said teachers could only be fired, non-renewed or suspended for “just and reasonable cause” and established certain due process rights for teachers before that could happen. (It also repealed a similar law for non-teaching school staff, the Public School Fair Hearing Act.)
As David Ramsey reported in January, the fact that teachers are public employees still gives them some due process rights. LEARNS says employees terminated during the school year still must get notice and the opportunity for a hearing. But there’s no such obligation with non-renewals from one school year to the next: It appears teachers can have their contracts non-renewed with no hearing and no reason offered for the decision.
LEARNS is forcing Arkansas school districts to completely revamp the year-to-year renewal process. In the past, employee contracts would automatically roll over into the next school year unless an employee was recommended for non-renewal. Now, school districts must recommend all employees either for renewal or non-renewal and get board approval.
It’s a big job, and it’s taking a while. In Little Rock, where declining student enrollment numbers and the costs of maintaining or replacing aging facilities has been dragging down the budget for years, some jobs inevitably will be going away next year. The LRSD board has been approving contract renewals in batches, with three already done and one more to be approved at a meeting this Thursday at 5:30 p.m.
Shawn Burgess, the district’s chief of human resources, told school board members at the May 9 meeting that an estimated 100 to 200 employees in the district will not be renewed for the 2024-25 school year after the final round of renewals this week.
A recent opinion from Attorney General Tim Griffin’s office says districts may give non-renewed employees grievance hearings.
But will they want them? Under LEARNS, such hearings must now be public.
Vicki Hatter was the only Little Rock School Board member who voted against approving last week’s batch of contract renewals. Hatter said she’s concerned about a lack of clarity. What will the district look like when positions are cut or moved around?
“We don’t have a restructure plan, so we really don’t know,” she said Tuesday.