Driving the Good Teachers Away
The Consequences of Bad Leadership and Legislative Undermining: Losing Teachers in Little Rock
This is the story of Jeff Grimmett, a teacher who recently resigned his position as the literacy specialist at Henderson Middle School (HMS) in Little Rock School District (LRSD.) Mr. Grimmett grew up in LRSD, and attended HMS as a student. His heart is with the HMS students, and with his colleagues in LRSD. Past principals have described him as “friendly, warm, caring, and respectful.”
Deputy Superintendent Marvin Burton, when he served as principal at HMS, described Jeff Grimmett by writing, “Teacher has well established rituals and routines and behavior is managed. The culture is one of learning for all students,” in Mr. Grimmett’s evaluation.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Jeff Grimmett has served as an executive board member of the teachers’ union (LREA,) an officer of the Parent/Teacher/Student Association, a club sponsor, and testing coordinator for HMS. He is experienced and well-respected. He worked above and beyond his contract, at a high-needs school, in a field (literacy) that is the district’s current highest priority. Why, then, is he leaving?
LRSD is currently operating under the direct control of Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s unqualified political appointee, Education Commissioner Johnny Key. These two orchestrated state takeover of LRSD in 2015 because six of its 42 schools were judged to be “failing” by the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE.) LRSD hasn’t improved under state control: LRSD is up to 22 failing schools, now, and a legislative effort to extend state control another four years recently failed, despite desperate, last-minute political machinations.
Last November, Commissioner Key instructed LRSD Superintendent Mike Poore to apply for a waiver from the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act (TFDA,) promising that it would only affect the teachers at LRSD’s failing schools. Key explained the waiver of due process “wouldn’t be used as a chainsaw — it’d be more like a scalpel” to fire bad teachers without allowing them a hearing or an appeal.
Despite Key’s false promises, on December 20, 2018, the State Board of Education waived the TFDA for the entirety of LRSD. Mr. Grimmett attended the meeting and spoke against the waiver, arguing that there was no consistency in applying “TESS” standards for evaluating teachers. He pointed out, “I’m on my fourth administrator now after 12 years,” and stated, “there needs to be a lot more accountability about how [TESS] is used going forward.”
Jeff Grimmett was speaking from experience. TESS requires a substantive evaluation of each teacher every four years, but nobody had bothered to evaluate Mr. Grimmett within the last five. Would he get fired based on an evaluation from five years ago? Probably not, because he’d always gotten good evaluations — but it’s inexcusable to give administrators the right to fire teachers without even evaluating them first.
It wasn’t only teachers objecting to the Fair Dismissal waiver. Retired Pine Bluff Police Chief Ivan Whitfield spoke against the waiver, too, echoing Mr. Grimmett’s sentiments on a broader scale: “You’re going to move the teachers out of the way for what the administrator didn’t do.”
Hindsight is 20/20. Now that the 2018–19 school year is over, we can look back and see that Mr. Grimmett and Mr. Whitfield were absolutely correct: Teachers are taking the fall for bad administrative practices, and students are being denied their right to an adequate education as a consequence.
For Jeff Grimmett, the scapegoating began immediately.
Henderson’s school principal, Yaa Appiah-McNulty, texted Jeff Grimmett about his opinions on TESS at 8:02 PM on Christmas Eve. He had published a Facebook post that she didn’t like, and she wanted him to edit it. He did, removing the words “joke,” “administrators,” and “hell.”
A few weeks later, 25 HMS teachers met (without their principal) to discuss the “dysfunctional” disciplinary process for students in their school. This meeting triggered an immediate response from Yaa Appiah-McNulty, who criticized the teachers for meeting “in isolation.” The teachers responded with a joint grievance asserting their rights, drafted by Jeff Grimmett and signed by half the staff of Henderson Middle School.
Jordan Eason, LRSD’s Employee Specialist, stepped in to help Yaa Appiah-McNulty respond. Eason (whose actions and tone remind me of a villain from “Harry Potter”) drafted the principal’s response to the joint grievance, and continued to support Appiah-McNulty’s efforts to silence teachers at Henderson for the rest of the year.
Yaa Appiah-McNulty didn’t limit her obstructionism to the bureaucratic world of grievances and hearings. She also intervened to stop Jeff Grimmett from meeting with the LRSD dyslexia specialist. The dyslexia specialist had planned, with Mr. Grimmett, to run dyslexia screeners on two students, and to support the struggling readers of Henderson Middle School. Yaa Appiah-McNulty explained, “Right now, we’ve got ACT-Aspire to get ready for…and I don’t want a distraction from anywhere else,” and cancelled the meeting. Yaa Appiah-McNulty cancelled her own meeting with the dyslexia specialist as well, so we shouldn’t expect any significant improvements at Henderson before next year.
Jeff Grimmett believed his principal was deliberately interfering with his ability to do his job as a literacy specialist, so on February 22, 2019, he asked Jordan Eason for a blank form to report harassment. Within hours of Mr. Grimmett’s request to Ms. Eason, Yaa Appiah-McNulty scheduled a disciplinary hearing for Jeff Grimmett — citing his collection of signatures for the group grievance nearly a month prior.
The teachers’ union tried to help, but even after a mediated conversation where Yaa Appiah-McNulty agreed that Mr. Grimmett and all other HMS teachers who had signed the grievance would have a “clean slate,” Yaa Appiah-McNulty drafted a formal, written reprimand regarding Mr. Grimmett’s role in drafting the group grievance. Ultimately, this disciplinary process continued (without resolution) until June 6, 2019 — long after the school year ended — and ended only because Jeff Grimmett resigned from LRSD.
I got in touch with Jeff Grimmett in March, 2019 — right in the middle of his disciplinary ordeal. He had taken a survey I created (gauging LRSD teacher sentiment toward their school and district leaders) and shared it on his Facebook page. Once the responses started arriving, I messaged him to ask if he knew why so many LRSD teachers were so miserable. Mr. Grimmett couldn’t answer for any school other than his own, but he was curious what the survey results from Henderson teachers looked like.
The teachers at Henderson weren’t happy, so I started hunting for explanatory data that distinguished HMS from other LRSD schools.
The next day, I messaged Mr. Grimmett again: “Henderson Middle School has the highest rate of exclusionary disciplinary actions I’ve seen so far — going in alphabetical order. 45 per 100 students.”
He responded, “When did you pull that data? I would bet that in the 1st semester it was far below average, and that so far in the 2nd semester it has been outrageously high.”
I was extremely curious. Instead of depending on secondhand information any longer, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to LRSD for “documentation for each student disciplinary action for the 2018–19 school year.” On March 8, 2019, I got my response from the district. There was nothing earth-shattering, so I wasn’t really pursuing it further — until another HMS teacher captured screenshots of disciplinary records being deleted a few hours prior to LRSD’s official response to my FOIA request.
The HMS teachers sent those screenshots (public records) to me. I wrote about the deletions in a blog post called “Rotten from the Head: Criminality in Little Rock School Administrators” and a satire called “How to Walk the Tightrope of Student Discipline Reporting Requirements.” Because of my blogging — and consistent with her totalitarian approach toward silencing dissent — Henderson’s principal, Yaa Appiah-McNulty, sued me for defamation and libel.
The good news is: My blogging about student discipline at Henderson Middle School reached the attention of parents in Illinois, where Ms. Appiah-McNulty used to work. Their records confirmed that Yaa Appiah-McNulty had a documented history of controversial approaches to student discipline since before she ever arrived in Little Rock.
With confidence in my sources and a firm belief in the constitutional right to free speech, I decided to post the HMS screenshots publicly— knowing that the screenshots didn’t (as Appiah-McNulty feared) violate students’ privacy. I wrote a blog post called “Ouch! I’ve been SLAPP-ed!” while my lawyer began preparing my formal Motion to Dismiss.
The very next day, Teresa Knapp Gordon (president of the Little Rock Education Association) messaged LREA board members, “If you spoke to Blogger Elizabeth Lyon Ballay about anything, you need to come see me ASAP. I will be at the office until at least 5pm this afternoon.” Yaa Appiah-McNulty’s lawsuit had made it clear she was prepared to accuse HMS teachers of violating federal privacy laws, so the LREA was gearing up to defend them.
I’ve addressed Appiah-McNulty’s “FERPA” scare tactics in my Motion to Dismiss, and in my subsequent lawsuit against LRSD: Basically, since the screenshots I used in my blog post do not contain identifiable student information, they don’t violate FERPA.
Nobody did anything wrong except the LRSD administrators — whose behavior (especially since the waiver of Fair Dismissal) is driving good teachers out of the district.
Jeff Grimmett is taking a $4000 pay cut to start teaching in the North Little Rock School District next year. NLRSD still has Fair Dismissal in place, so Mr. Grimmett hopes he will have a better work environment. If he were to stay in LRSD, Mr. Grimmett reasonably expects he’d be stuck in harm’s way.
According to a recent study by Erin P. Sugrue, published in the American Educational Research Journal, teachers who work for education systems that cause harm and betray the public’s trust are at risk of “moral injury,” a condition frequently experienced by military veterans. LRSD and the Arkansas Department of Education are putting educators in the same situation as soldiers who are forced to hurt innocent children. They spend their lives trying to recover from the trauma of their experience. I hope we can learn from Jeff Grimmett’s experience, and fix the system before it hurts any others.
When the State Board of Education voted to waive Fair Dismissal, Board Member Ouida Newton argued in favor of the waiver, stating:
My focus is not on the teachers. My focus is on the administrators, the instructional support staff, and all of those people. Those D and F schools did not get there by themselves. They — at some point teachers were not getting the support they needed, teachers were not getting the [professional development] they needed, teachers were not getting what they needed to be effective in those classrooms. And the reason I’m looking at district-wide, the support staff is not going to be just for that one D or F school; the support staff is district-wide, and that’s the reasoning behind my focus.
Board Member Diane Zook (wife of Randy Zook, the union-busting president of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce) also spoke in favor of the waiver, saying good teachers don’t need to worry. “There are many of us. . . that taught before [the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act] was passed. We were quality teachers, so we did not have to worry.”
Well, good for her — but that’s not what’s happening in Little Rock. The good teachers are leaving, the bad administrators are gaining ground, and the Arkansas Department of Education is twiddling its thumbs. They’re waiting for the district to fail completely so that they can sell off the parts to their profiteering fraudster friends in the charter school industry.
To Jeff Grimmett, from all of us fighting the good fight: Good luck! We are sorry this happened to you, and to others like you. Thank you for your service.
