Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991 TAG: 9102150698
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By NEAL THOMPSON EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Norfolk Del. Jerrauld Jones, who was friends with the custodian, said the man told him the allegations were false.
It didn't matter, though, because the custodian never was able to tell his side of the story. Because he was a so-called "classified employee," he had no access to a grievance procedure like the one offered teachers.
Jones decided that - regardless of the custodian's guilt or innocence - it wasn't fair to deny custodians, bus drivers, secretaries and cafeteria workers the same rights as teachers. So, in the 1989 General Assembly he introduced a bill that would give classified school employees their own grievance procedure.
After failing the first year and being carried over from last year, that bill passed the House of Delegates 56-41 Thursday, after it was amended and approved Monday by the Senate.
"This is a major step," Jones said Thursday. "This is the last category of public employees to get due-process rights."
Jones said the grievance procedure allows a fired or demoted employee to tell his side of the story. And it protects employees through monitoring of administrative disciplinary decisions. Without it, those employees were "second-class citizens," he said.
Jones said it was unfair that teachers had more rights than custodians, "who are, in every sense of the word, public employees."
"I'm excited," said Doris Boitnott, executive director of the Roanoke County Education Association, which represents county school employees. "These are rights that these classified personnel deserve."
If the bill is signed into law, each state school board would have a year to adopt a written policy on establishing a classified grievance procedure.
Classified employees were vulnerable without access to such a procedure, said Gary Waldo, executive director of the Roanoke Education Association. He said the grievance procedure is "a rational and decent way to resolve problems without . . . litigation."
Though many state school boards opposed Jones' bill, Roanoke and Roanoke County have had an unwritten practice of offering their classified employees a grievance procedure.
"We've been doing that for years, although we don't have it in written policy version," said Roanoke County Superintendent Bayes Wilson. "So, we don't have any major problem with that."
The Virginia School Boards Association had opposed the bill, claiming that grievance procedures for classified employees should be voluntary.
Last year, the association urged its members to adopt their own policies to prevent the state from mandating one. But an association study found that late last year nearly two-thirds of the state's school boards did not have such a policy.
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY
by CNB