Teachers’ union to file complaint over videotape surveillance of classroom
According to the Associated Press, the Everett teachers union says it will file a unfair-labor practice complaint against the Everett School District (ESD) with the Washington Public Employees Relations Commission over the ESD’s videotape surveillance of a high-school teacher's classroom for about a month last year. The union claims the district violated labor practices and employees' rights and is calling for an open hearing about how the recordings, which are now missing, were used. Superintendent Carol Whitehead issued a letter to ESD employees in which she revealed Friday that the district used a video camera to tape English and journalism teacher Kay Powers' classroom between May 10 and June 11, 2007. A school district lawyer had previous denied that a surveillance camera had been used. According to the superintendent, the surveillance was conducted to determine who was entering and leaving the classroom on weekends. She stated that ESD’s “paramount duty to protect students.” “I don't believe we have violated any laws,” she said. Ms. Powers was placed on leave in June and fired in November for helping students publish an underground newspaper despite a warning not to do so. She was reinstated in April to a teaching post at Henry M. Jackson High School after reaching a settlement with the district. In the letter, Superintendent Whitehead insisted the teacher was fired because she spent hours alone with a student producing an underground newspaper, violating curfew and district driving rules. The letter also claimed Ms. Powers misused school computers, equipment and software, Whitehead wrote. Mitch Cogdill, a lawyer for the teachers union, contends that had the case gone to a hearing, ESD would not have been able to prove those allegations. “If all this is true, why did she hire [Powers] back?” Cogdill asked. “Isn't she being negligent in doing so if it's true?”
Source: Seattle Times, 5/29/08, By Associated Press