Ruling in favor of ISTA/NEA in Elliott v. Madison Consolidated Schools
03/12/2015
ISTA and NEA filed the Elliott v. Madison Consolidated School Board lawsuit challenging the layoff of a 19-year permanent teacher (Mr. Elliott) over more junior teachers. Several grounds were cited including that the layoff violated the Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The reason given by the school corporation for Mr. Elliott’s layoff was that in 2011 Indiana enacted SB 1, which among many other things required all teacher layoffs to be based on performance, not seniority.
The school district laid off Mr. Elliott over six teachers with less seniority based on the theory that a decade before his layoff, Mr. Elliott received three “needs improvement” ratings out of 140 evaluation ratings received over the course of his career, 137 of the evaluations were satisfactory or better.
Today, the federal district court for the Southern District of Indiana ruled in favor of Mr. Elliott on his contracts clause claim. The court easily found that Mr. Elliott’s priority layoff rights were part of his contractual tenure rights, and that his layoff substantially impaired those rights.
As the court bluntly put it, “The Court cannot fathom a more substantial impairment than the one in the case at bar. Had SB 1 not been enacted, . . ., Mr. Elliott’s contract would have been renewed. SB 1’s RIF provision completely destroyed Mr. Elliott’s contractual right.”
The court also rejected the state and school district’s arguments that the substantial impairment of Mr. Elliott’s contractual rights was reasonable and necessary to serve an important state purpose – which is the final prong of the contracts clause analysis.
The court rejected the defendant’s contentions that a performance based layoff regime is necessary to ensure teacher quality, finding that “there was—and still is—a means of getting rid of ineffective teachers: terminate their contracts for incompetence.”
“School boards have always had the ability to fire poor-performing tenured teachers; in fact, school boards did not—indeed, they still do not—have to wait for a RIF in order to terminate poor-performing tenured teachers.” The court noted that since the enactment of SB 1, school boards have even more grounds and evidence on which they can move to terminate poor-performing teachers.
The ruling just came down and we will continue to keep members informed of its significance in the coming days.