In Illinois, as elsewhere, the state’s school districts have their own Labor Relations Acts and Boards. Illinois teachers’ unions are certified, and their claims of unfair labor practices are heard, by the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board (or IELRB).
It has been that way for many years, and while the body of decisions by the IELRB grows, it’s you’d think that the jurisdiction of the Board is rarely questioned. Schools are in, everyone else is out.
Of course, no issue of labor & employment law is ever really settled. Even whether schools are within the jurisdiction of the Education Labor Relations Board.
When is a School a School?
A union in Kane County filed with the IELRB to acknowledge majority representation of the teachers of a charter school, and the Board certified the union. The school took issue, arguing that the IELRB does not have jurisdiction over charter schools because they’re not “educational employers” as defined by the IELRA. The Board disagreed, and the school appealed.
The school’s argument was that the Charter School Act exempts charter schools from “other [s]tate laws and regulations under the School Code”, and that this exemption included the Education Labor Relation Act. The union countered that the IELRA was not an education law, but rather a law about how an employer that happened to be a school dealt with its employees.
The Fourth District Appellate Court sided with the school. The court separated the phrase excluding charter schools from certain state laws into two interesting parts: “other state laws” and “regulations under the School Code”. The court pointed to non-education laws that are specifically mentioned in the Charter Schools Act, saying that the legislature clearly did not want to limit the exlusions to education-related laws:
…to conclude that charter schools are not exempt from the Education Labor Act would be to assume the legislature overlooked the Education Labor Act when it drafted the list of specific exceptions. We reject this assumption and conclude that the omission of the Education Labor Act from the list of specified exceptions is not somehow a legislative oversight.
Questions of Intent
The court’s opinion notes that both sides, along with numerous other interested parties, wrote briefs analyzing the legislature’s intent in drafting and passing (or opposing) the Charter School Act, as a way of proving that the schools should or shouldn’t be under the Board’s purview. The court did a decent job of sidestepping the political issue inherent in that discussion by holding that the statute was plainly written, and refusing to consider what the intent of specific legislators was in drafting it.
A Moot Point?
The court’s opinion ends with a note that a recent legislative change specifically states that charter schools are “educational employers”. The law isn’t in effect until next year, though, so the court said it couldn’t apply to the case before the court. Nonetheless, it seems that one major difference between charter schools and typical public schools – the lack of unionized teachers - may be in flux in the coming years.
At the very least, it looks like next year we won’t be questioning whether schools are under the jurisdiction of the IELRB.
After two years of teaching in School District 186, Tammy Wood was in a car accident. Her contract had been renewed for a third year, and the District granted her request for leave for both semesters to recover. At the end of that year, the District again renewed Wood’s contract. She returned that fall and taught for a fourth year at District 186.
At the end of the year, the District issued Wood a letter informing her – without providing a reason - that it would not be renewing her contract for the following school year. Wood sued the District, claiming she had tenure, and the District couldn’t terminate her contract without cause.
The School District argued that Wood wasn’t tenured because she hadn’t taught for four consecutive years. She taught for two, was out on disability for one whole year, and then taught for another year. The curcuit court agreed with Wood and ordered the District to reinstate her. The District appealed, and last week the Court of Appeals sided with Wood as well.
In Illinois, by statute, teachers reach tenure after 4 consecutive years in the same district.* Tenure, of course, means job protection – a nontenured teacher is employed year-by-year, while a tenured teacher’s contract automatically renews – they can only be fired for cause, or as the statute puts it, “a specific reason.”
The Appellate Court said that the School Code didn’t require four years of teaching – it required four years of employment as a teacher:
It is undisputed that Wood was employed in the district as a full-time teacher for four years. That she was granted a leave of absence from her teaching duties to recover from a serious injury does not change the fact that she was a contractual employee and that she was paid as a full-time teacher for four consecutive years, including the [year she was on leave].
Finally, it’s important to note that the District’s error was not necessarily terminating Wood, but that it didn’t give “a specific reason” for the termination. Since she was arguably on the cusp of tenure, and there’s no rule against giving non-tenured teachers reasons for their termination, the District could have saved itself a lot of time (and money – appeals aren’t cheap) by explaining its reasoning in the first place.
The court seemed to think the District may have omitted the “specific reason” because it didn’t have one. In dicta, the court noted that the District renewed Wood’s contract the year after her leave, which means they must have “held a favorable view of her abilities” at the beginning of the year.
Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has ordered state agencies to cut ties with Bank of America. [story continued below video]
The Governor announced the move at a press conference held today at the former headquarters of recently-shuttered Republic Windows and Doors in the Goose Island neighborhood of Chicago. The company’s laid-off employees have been staging a sit-in at the warehouse since last week, protesting both the company’s decision not to pay the workers for their accrued vacation and sick days, as well as Bank of America’s decision to cut Republic’s line of credit.
The move is leverage to convince the North Carolina-based bank to use some of its federal bailout money to resolve the situation at Republic Windows and Doors.
***
Blagojevich says banks got bailout money and should provide lines of credit to businesses that need it so workers can keep working.
Also – apparently after some investigation by attorney general Lisa Madigan’s office – the state will seek a federal injunction tomorrow to ensure the company follows the 60-day pay provisions set out in the WARN Act, violations of which were the impetus for the sit-in.
