Administration Clashes With Teachers Over Survey
By David Harrison david.harrison@roanoke.com 777-3523
A Roanoke teachers’ group is clashing with the city’s school administration over a survey that the group has distributed to some of the district’s full-time employees without the superintendent’s permission.
The Roanoke Education Association asked Superintendent Marvin Thompson for permission to distribute the survey in January. Thompson wrote back and requested a meeting.
Because of scheduling difficulties, REA members and Thompson did not meet until March 8. At that meeting, Thompson told the group his staff was reviewing the survey and would make a decision on whether to allow the survey to be distributed in schools by March 14.
It’s unclear whether the administration has reached a decision. School system spokeswoman Tiffany Woods could not be reached Wednesday. But Dawn Rees-Blakeman, president of the REA, said she had received an e-mail from the administration outlining the administration’s process for evaluating whether to allow materials to be distributed in the schools.
Under the school board’s policy, anybody who wants to distribute materials on school grounds must first get approval from the superintendent. The policy states that materials not related to instruction cannot be distributed during school hours.
But by the time the two sides met last week, the REA had already started distributing the survey at city schools without the superintendent’s permission, a possible violation of school board policy.
Rees-Blakeman said the group grew frustrated after weeks went by without getting a response from the administration on the survey and decided to distribute it anyway. Representatives from the group handed it out to their colleagues at after-school staff meetings.
“We can’t wait around forever,” Rees-Blakeman said, adding that the REA intended to use the results of the survey to advise the school board during the budget process, currently under way.
The two-page survey, created by the REA with help from the Virginia Education Association, asks respondents about their job satisfaction and about their thoughts on salaries, benefits and working conditions. There are also questions about the performance of school administrators, city council members, the school board and the REA.
Last month, principals received a memo from the administration saying that “the distribution through the school system is not following an approved and legal process.”
“Please advise your staff that this survey has not been endorsed or approved by the school board or superintendent,” the memo said.
Rees-Blakeman said she knows of a handful of principals who have refused to allow the survey to be handed out at their schools after receiving the memo. She would not identify those principals.
Dena Rosenkrantz, an attorney for the VEA, said school administrators have the right to determine what happens on school property.
“Schools are public property but they’re not open to the public all the time for any purpose,” she said. “School administrators do have authority to keep people off the property, to tell people what they’re allowed to do on the property or not allowed to do on the property.”
Still, she added, there are limits to how much that authority is enforced.
“The PTA, the Girl Scouts, the teachers’ association, typically we are part of the school family,” she said. “Why does anybody make a fuss about us doing something on school property?”
It’s not uncommon for local teachers’ groups to survey their peers to get a sense of their job satisfaction, said Bill Johnson, a VEA spokesman.
School board Chairman David Carson said he had no objection to school employees filling out surveys on their own time.
“On their own time, any RCPS [Roanoke City Public Schools] employee as well as any citizen can do anything they’d like to do, including fill out a survey,” Carson said Tuesday.
He declined to comment further on the dustup.
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