“TUSD’s rhetoric about controlling bullying and maintaining a good learning climate in classrooms seemed to be set aside on Tuesday night, when the board approved major changes to the district’s discipline handbook by a 4-1 vote,” wrote Tucson Unified Board member Mark Stegeman in his latest letter to constituents.
Board member Michael Hicks is asking to bring the issue back before the vote. He voted ‘yes’ after he had been told by the district’s new superintendent, H.T. Sanchez, that without this new code, the district would be completely without a code of conduct.
The problem lies in the fact that the new code’s discipline policy, GSRR, appears to violate state laws and, according to Stegeman, “greatly reduce principals’ options for removing abusive students from classrooms and limiting their access to other students during the school day.”
In other words, bullies have free reign.
Superintendent H.T. Sanchez attempted to change Board policy without a Board vote at all; however, Stegeman stopped the move. “The board learned of the proposed changes to GSRR last Friday, in an email attachment that listed the proposed changes and indicated that they would take effect unless a board member requested a board vote by Monday morning (which I did),” wrote Stegeman.
“I doubt whether staff has the power to make changes to a board-adopted policy document without a public vote,” Stegeman told constituents, “and I am concerned about the speed of the action and the minimal public notice.”
It is that failure to understand the public’s role that has so many alarmed about the tactics of the new superintendent. Just this week, he advised members of the public that he hopes to bring in more friends from Texas to fill key administrative spots. Before the ink was dry on his contract, Sanchez insisted that the Board hire a friend from Texas, Adrian Vega, to fill the spot of retiring deputy superintendent, Maria Menconi. Vega, a high school principal in Texas, took the spot which was offered without the customary competitive process at a rate far higher than Menconi received.
Stegeman called the policy change and the “abruptness of the action,” one of the most troubling things that he had seen in his five years on the board. The Board only received notice of the proposed changes on Friday, and they were only added to the agenda on Monday afternoon, allowing little time for inquiry or input.
During the vote for the policy change, Sanchez was forceful in his dismissal of Board member concerns telling them, “We’re done, we’re done with our presentation. We’re ready to move forward with the vote.”
The Department of Justice has been actively involved in the development of the new guidelines. Although Sanchez claimed that the plaintiffs wanted the plan, they claim that the plan was conceived by the DOJ and the plaintiffs’ concerns were ignored. The plaintiff representative said the new system “will create chaos.”
TUSD classifies disciplinary infractions from Level 1 to Level 5. The new changes mainly restrict the options available to principals at Levels 2 and 3, which the GSRR defines as “low-level” offenses. “For these reasons, I am concerned that Tuesday’s policy changes may do great damage to principals’ ability to maintain safe and effective educational environments,” wrote Stegeman.
Arizona law gives any teacher the right to “send a pupil to the principal’s office in order to maintain effective discipline in the classroom…. The principal shall not return a pupil to the classroom from which the pupil was removed without the teacher’s consent unless [a committee constituted for this purpose] determines that the return of the pupil to that classroom is the best or only practicable alternative.”
Stegeman concludes: “If a teacher removes a disruptive student from her classroom, but TUSD’s new policy rules out in-house suspension, then the principal’s only option appears to be immediate reassignment to another class (regardless of whether any similar class is available). This could lead to the bizarre situation in which teachers at the school sequentially exercise their rights to remove the disruptive student; if all do so, then it appears that TUSD’s new policy would force the committee described by state law to send the student back to one of those classes. Until the committee acts, the principal might be forced to choose between complying with the state law that establishes teachers’ right to exclude and TUSD’s policy forbidding exclusion until other interventions are implemented and documented.”