Teachers fired more than two years ago, and still sitting on waiting lists hundreds deep to have their appeals heard, may find their luck is about to change.
The D.C. Court of Appeals ordered the Office of Employee Appeals (say that three times fast) to figure out a way to resolve delays in assigning judges to outstanding cases within the next 20 days.
The agency is supposed to hand out decisions within 120 days. But that wasn’t happening, and with hundreds upon hundreds of teachers fired in the last few years, the backlog became startling.
As The Examiner reported in November:
As of Sept. 27, she was No. 631 on the wait list. Educators terminated in November 2009 said in court documents that they were Nos. 121, 133, 153, 185, 216, 219 and 248 when they checked in the last few months.
The employee agency says it couldn’t process the claims because of budgetary constraints, a defense the D.C. Circuit Court shot down. But it still remains to be seen if the Office of Employee Appeals will assign these judges and get these cases going if they truly don’t have the money.
Either way, Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders, who filed the suit, said the ruling “is definitely a step in the right direction.”
