Teachers fired two years ago from D.C. Public Schools are sitting on waiting lists hundreds of people deep to have their appeals heard, despite the 120-day decision window that the District guarantees, according to court documents filed Tuesday.
Meanwhile, DCPS is filing its second appeal to keep about 75 teachers fired in 2008 from being reinstated, despite rulings from an arbitrator and the Public Employee Relations Board declaring the terminations wrongful.
An arbitrator said the approximately 75 teachers were wrongfully terminated because they were never given a chance to refute their principals’ negative evaluations.
DCPS appealed the decision to the labor relations board, which upheld the ruling. A spokesman for Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said DCPS is again appealing.
The system fired an additional 229 teachers and staffers in October 2009 in a budget-related “reduction in force.”
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The Washington Teachers’ Union filed a “writ of mandamus” against the city’s Office of Employee Appeals on Tuesday, saying the agency denied due process by failing to even assign judges to teachers terminated two years ago, and demanding the office do so.
The backlog is affecting teachers terminated more recently, including the 206 fired in July for poor ratings on the Impact teacher evaluation tool.
“Judge [Wanda] Jackson told me it would be years until ‘anyone would even look at [my] case,’ and that it would probably be three years or more before my case was decided,” said Tracey Luce, who taught fifth and sixth grade and appealed her termination in August.
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.
Office of Employee Appeals Executive Director Sheila Barfield, who was confirmed last week, said her agency handles about one appeal per business day. More than 200 DCPS cases are pending, with those of other government employees.
“We received more appeals [from October] than we had that entire fiscal year, so that really put us under the gun,” she said. “We got all those cases yet we did not get any additional staff or additional funding at that time.”
