7,000 New Orleans teachers, laid off after Katrina, win court ruling
Source: The Times Picayune
In a lawsuit that some say could bankrupt the Orleans Parish public school system, an appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said. The decision was unanimous.
The state is partly responsible for damages, according to Wednesday's ruling from Louisiana's Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. However, the five-judge panel did reduce the potential damages certified by the District Court: Instead of five years of back pay plus fringe benefits, the appeals court awarded the teachers two to three years of back pay, with benefits only for those employees who had participated in them when they were employed.
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The class-action case applies to all School Board employees who were tenured as of Aug. 29, 2005, the date that Katrina blasted up the Louisiana-Mississippi line and New Orleans levees failed, flooding much of the city. Many employees were members of the United Teachers of New Orleans; the appeals court ruled that an earlier settlement with the union did not prevent the current case from being tried.
The decision validates the anger felt by former teachers who lost their jobs. It says they should have been given top consideration for jobs in the new education system that emerged in New Orleans in the years after the storm.
Read more: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/01/7000_new_orleans_teachers_laid.html
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)and croak the charters that hire people to run around the Walmart parking lot chasing prospective parents, and dump students with disabilities on the state-run Recovery School District.
madfloridian
(88,117 posts)Glad to hear that.
n2doc
(47,953 posts)What a country.
Plucketeer
(12,882 posts)Teachers get crapped on too much as it is. We need more system bucking like this!