City councilmen and members of the Providence Public School District discussed the practice of "bumping" Rhode Island teachers out of jobs with state legislators, parents and teachers Monday night at City Hall. The meeting was run by the City Council's new special committee on education.
In March, Rhode Island schools issue pink slips to teachers, terminating their contracts to save money, often intending to rehire them. All teachers in Rhode Island are hired on one-year contracts, regardless of tenure, according to Tomas Hanna, the Providence school district's deputy superintendent for operations.
Currently, teachers are laid off in reverse seniority, so the most junior teachers get fired first. Ward 2 Councilman Cliff Wood, chair of the education committee, called the meeting a research effort. Presenters included Hanna and attorney Samuel Zurier, who compared Rhode Island's education policies to Massachusetts'.
Speakers agreed that laying off teachers based on seniority was flawed, and many complained about Rhode Island's lack of comprehensive teacher evaluations. But without good knowledge of teachers' merits, seniority is the best way to evaluate teachers, members of the committee and audience said. Hanna said that "people used to make judgments based on those "-isms:" nepotism, favoritism, racism," before conceding "we also suffer from not having a fair ... evaluation process."
Rhode Island teachers are evaluated every five years once they are tenured. Non-tenured teachers, or those with fewer than three years of teaching experience, are evaluated every year, Hanna said.
Committee and audience members also addressed teacher job security. This year, about 700 teachers received pink slips, but only about 100 lost their jobs permanently, Hanna said. Most teachers who receive pink slips are reinstated over the summer, once funding becomes available. Schools can only employ teachers if state funding is available up-front.
When money is not available up-front, the cause is a lack of organization, according to Hanna. "A key strategy is better planning, strong planning, better infrastructure within departments, having a sense of what's going to go on," Hanna said.
"We don't know what a budget is," said Tomas Ramirez '86, assistant superintendant of human resources and labor relations in the school district's human resources department.
Sending teachers pink slips in the spring could show budgetary disorganization, Hanna said. The pink slips may protect schools from being overstaffed, Hanna said. "You can look at it that way - rather err on that side (of caution)," he said.
Rhode Island House of Representatives Majority Leader Gordon Fox, D-Dist. 4, urged audience members to consider amending existing legislation instead of throwing it out. "Why do we send out 700 notices (to teachers)? That's practice, that's not law," he said. "Some of (the problems are) not based upon state law or local ordinance," he added.
House Rep. Steven Smith, D-Dist. 13, echoed Fox's optimism but said it was unclear what measures the state could undertake without changing legislation. "There's some things that can happen immediately," said Smith, president of the Providence Teachers Union. "If we're going to be doing what's best for kids, it can't just be a math problem." Setting up a "predictable funding" system could help solve the "bumping" problem, Smith said.
Though Wood said he was optimistic, he didn't promise any immediate solutions and emphasized the research-based nature of his committee. Wood said, "This state law - I don't know what it is, I don't know what its repercussions are. When we figure out that, we're going to go over it," he said, adding he was "trying to find out what's up."
