A Shelton High School teacher stripped of her role as the student newspaper’s adviser withdrew a grievance she had lodged protesting the move.
A hearing was scheduled Aug.11 for three school board members to hear the grievance filed by Carolyn Finley appealing her reassignment in May by Beth Smith, the high school’s headmaster.
But a union official withdrew the grievance on Finley’s behalf after unsuccessfully trying to get a reporter thrown out of the proceeding.
Background
Several students Finley taught over the years loudly protested Smith’s move at a May school board meeting.
Finley had first raised the grievance disputing her reassignment with Smith herself, per the contract the teacher’s union has with the school, then, after Smith denied her appeals, with Superintendent Freeman Burr.
The Valley Indy sent a Freedom of Information request to Burr Aug. 12 seeking access to the grievance Finley filed, as well as her personnel file.
Burr responded Aug. 13, saying he referred request to the school district’s human resources department.
Burr said he denied Finley’s “Level 2” grievance “because the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Shelton Education Association and the Board of Education allows building principals the discretion to reassign teachers. Reassignments occur annually within the school district although there may be an occasion when a teacher is not pleased with the change.”
Finley appealed Burr’s decision to the school board, which was to hear the matter last week.
But seconds after school board Chairman Mark Holden opened the hearing, Deborah Keller, the president of the Shelton Education Association, asked that a Valley Indy reporter in attendance be told to leave.
“The reporter goes?” she asked.
The school board’s lawyer, Christine Chinni, said no.
“Actually, not during the evidentiary portion,” Chinni said. “He’s allowed to be here.”
“OK,” Keller replied. “When does he leave?”
“When you do,” Chinni said.
She then asked Keller, Finley, and James McCauley, a labor specialist at the Connecticut Education Association also in attendance Monday, if they wanted to confer before proceeding.
They said yes and left the room.
Click the play button on the video above to see the beginning of the hearing.
About 20 minutes later the trio returned.
“At this time we would like to withdraw the grievance,” Keller said.
Holden, who had appointed fellow board members Win Oppel and Arlene Liscinsky to sit on a panel to hear Finley’s grievance, then adjourned the hearing.
The Valley Indy left a message at Keller’s publicly listed phone number Tuesday (Aug. 12).
Huh?
Finley said Tuesday that she decided to drop her grievance because she realized, after a close reading of the contract between the school board and the teacher’s union, she faced an uphill battle that she would probably lose.
“(The reassignment) was not by definition grievable according to the contract,” Finley said.
But it seemed like she was ready to proceed with the hearing Monday and then changed her mind once she saw the Valley Indy was covering it.
Asked if that was so, Finley said: “I don’t believe that that’s completely the case.”
“It was just a case of being realistic,” she said. “Even if we hoped to be at least able to get my message across to the members of the board that were there, it wasn’t going to change the outcome.
She said she thought Monday’s hearing would only involve her and the three school board members.
“There was no point in bringing any more attention to it,” she said. “I don’t think that would be a benefit to me.”
She said that there are “other options” available to dispute her reassignment, but declined to discuss what, specifically, those options are.
She hasn’t decided whether to contest her reassignment further, she said.
“Obviously the job (of adviser) has been filled, and I received my new schedule for the new year,” she said. “I know that my students are not happy. I’m not ultimately happy with the decision.”
“I’m very saddened that I won’t be able to continue to do this because of the fact that I felt very passionate about teaching journalism,” she said. “I truly, truly enjoyed it. I loved working with my students. You build a different relationship in a journalism class than you do in a traditional English class.”
She said it’s that “family-like atmosphere” she’ll miss the most.
“It’s unfortunate,” she said. “It’ll be interesting to see how the year goes. I’m sure that within the confines of my classroom, I’ll be fine.”
School Board Chairman Reacts
Holden, the school board chairman, said Tuesday that Finley’s reading of the case — that she would have lost — was correct.
“Contractually, what Dr. Smith did was within the scope of what the contract with the teacher’s union allows,” he said. “It was a reassignment.”
He said he didn’t want the school board to “micromanage” Smith’s supervision of the high school.
“The board doesn’t really get involved on that level, because that would be micromanaging,” he said. “We are really more involved with the broad strokes, policy ends of things.
“If there were deemed to be a problem that could not be resolved on a building level, then it may percolate up to us,” Holden went on. “But otherwise, we’re not going to get involved in deciding what color to paint the lockers.”
He said she still has a “prestigious” assignment at the school — teaching Advanced Placement-level courses.
“Realistically, she traded one set of important responsibilities for another,” he said.
