Opinion ID: 1684540
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether The Tribunal Has The Authority To Alter The Sanction To Be Imposed.

Text: The Board's first claim is that the tribunal in a teacher tenure case is limited only to fact-finding and has no power to modify the sanctions imposed by the school superintendent. The Board notes that the tribunal is an administrative entity, and thus is a creature solely of statute, but that the enabling statute that provides for the existence and operations of the tribunal, KRS 161.790, does not grant authority to impose lower sanctions on teachers. Though in Reis v. Campbell County Board of Education, [1] we previously declared that the tribunal has ultimate control over the termination of a teacher's contract, we have not had the opportunity to address the specific issue of whether that authority also includes the power to impose alternative sanctions on a teacher. We now hold that the tribunal convened under KRS 161.790 also has the power to impose lesser sanctions in lieu of termination of a teacher's contract. KRS 161.790, which was originally enacted in 1942, creates a system of tenure for teachers in Kentucky's public schools. Since at least the 1980s, the statute has provided that teachers may not be fired absent the existence of at least one of several defined causes: The contract of a teacher shall remain in force during good behavior and efficient and competent service by the teacher and shall not be terminated except for any of the following causes: (a) Insubordination, including but not limited to [ ] violation[] [of the school laws of the state or administrative regulations adopted by the Kentucky Board of Education, the Education Professional Standards Board, or] lawful rules and regulations established by the local board of education for the operation of schools ...; (b) Immoral character or conduct unbecoming a teacher; (c) Physical or mental disability; (d) Inefficiency, incompetency, or neglect of duty . . . . [2] Though some of the descriptions of what constitutes insubordination have expanded, these four fundamental categories of cause have remained substantially the same. The statute also provides an administrative procedure for the school superintendent to utilize to initiate termination of the teacher's contract for cause or to impose lesser sanctions on the teacher. Before 1990, the administrative procedures were controlled by the Board of Education directly, providing as follows: (3) No contract shall be terminated except upon recommendation of the superintendent and unless the teacher is furnished with a written statement, specifying in detail the charge or charges against said teacher, signed by the chairman and secretary of the board of education and naming a date and place at which the teacher may appear before the board of education and answer said charge or charges. Said date for the hearing shall not be less than twenty (20) nor more than thirty (30) days after the service of such charges upon the teacher. The teacher shall within ten (10) days after the receipt of the written statement of such charges notify the board of education of his intention to appear and answer such charges, and upon failure of the teacher to give such notice, the board of education may dismiss the teacher by a majority vote and such dismissal shall be final. (4) Upon receipt of the teacher's notice of intention to appear and answer such charges, the board of education shall issue such subpoenas as shall be necessary for the determination of the issues involved. The issue shall be heard at the time and place set and the hearing shall be public or private at the discretion of the teacher. Both parties may be represented by counsel and may require the presence of witnesses upon subpoena. Each witness shall be required to take oath or affirmation before an officer of the board of education. The board of education shall provide for a stenographic report of the proceedings and furnish the teacher with a copy. Upon completion of both sides of the case the board of education may by a majority vote dismiss the teacher or may defer its action for not more than five (5) days. (5) The board of education may, on recommendation of the superintendent, suspend a teacher pending final action to terminate his contract if, in its judgment, the character of the charges warrants such action. If after the hearing the decision of the board is against termination of the contract, the suspended teacher shall be paid his full salary for the period of such suspension. (6) The teacher shall have a right to make an appeal both as to law and as to fact to the circuit court. If said appeal is not made within thirty (30) days after dismissal, then the decision of the board of education shall be final. Such appeal shall be an original action in said court and shall be commenced by the filing of a petition against such board of education, in which petition the facts shall be alleged upon which the teacher relies for a reversal or modification of the order of termination of contract. Upon service or waiver of summons in said appeal, such board of education shall forthwith transmit to the clerk of said court for filing a transcript of the original notice of charges and a transcript of all evidence adduced at the hearing before such board, whereupon the cause shall be at issue without further pleading and shall be advanced and heard without delay. The court shall examine the transcript and record of the hearing before the board of education and shall hold such additional hearings as it may deem advisable, at which it may consider other evidence in addition to such transcript and record. Upon final hearing, the court shall grant or deny the relief prayed for in the petition as may be proper under the provisions of KRS 161.720 to 161.810 and in accordance with the evidence adduced at the hearing. Either the teacher or the board of education may appeal from the action of the court to the Court of Appeals. As an alternative to termination of a teacher's contract, the board of education may, by majority vote, impose other sanctions, including but not limited to, suspension without pay, transfer notwithstanding the provisions of KRS 160.380 and 161.760, public reprimand or private reprimand. The decision to impose sanctions is within the discretion of the board after a hearing on the charges. Upon hearing both sides of the case, the board may impose a sanction or may defer its action for not more than five (5) days. The decision of the board shall be final. Upon completion of a suspension period, the teacher may be reinstated. The statute has been amended several times since 1990 [3] as part of the extensive education reforms following our decision in Rose v. Council for Better Education, Inc. [4] KRS 161.790 now provides the following procedures: [5] (3) No contract shall be terminated except upon notification of the board by the superintendent. Prior to notification of the board, the superintendent shall furnish the teacher with a written statement specifying in detail the charge against the teacher. The teacher may within ten (10) days after receiving the charge notify the chief state school officer and the superintendent of his intention to answer the charge, and upon failure of the teacher to give notice within ten (10) days, the dismissal shall be final. (4) Upon receiving the teacher's notice of his intention to answer the charge, the chief state school officer shall appoint a three (3) member tribunal, consisting of one (1) teacher, one (1) administrator, and one (1) lay person, none of whom reside in the district, to conduct an administrative hearing in accordance with KRS Chapter 13B within the district. The chief state school officer shall name the chairman and set the date and time for the hearing. The hearing shall begin no later than forty-five (45) days after the teacher files the notice of intent to answer the charge. (5) A hearing officer shall have final authority to rule on dispositive prehearing motions. (6) The hearing may be public or private at the discretion of the teacher. At the hearing, a hearing officer appointed by the chief state school officer shall preside with authority to rule on procedural matters, but the tribunal shall be the ultimate trier of fact. The local board shall pay each member of the tribunal a per diem of one hundred dollars ($100) and travel expenses. (7) Upon hearing both sides of the case, the tribunal may by a majority vote render its decision or may defer its action for not more than five (5) days. Provisions of KRS Chapter 13B notwithstanding, the tribunal decision shall be a final order and may be rendered on the record. (8) The superintendent may suspend the teacher pending final action to terminate the contract, if, in his judgment, the character of the charge warrants the action. If after the hearing the decision of the tribunal is against termination of the contract, the suspended teacher shall be paid his full salary for any period of suspension. (9) The teacher shall have the right to make an appeal to the Circuit Court having jurisdiction in the county where the school district is located in accordance with KRS Chapter 13B. The review of the final order shall be conducted by the Circuit Court as required by KRS 13B.150. (10) As an alternative to termination of a teacher's contract, the superintendent upon notifying the board and providing written notification to the teacher of the charge may impose other sanctions, including, suspension without pay, public reprimand, or private reprimand. The procedures set out in subsection (3) of this section shall apply if the teacher is suspended without pay or publicly reprimanded. The teacher may appeal the action of the superintendent if these sanctions are imposed in the same manner as established in subsections (4) to (9) of this section. Upon completion of a suspension period, the teacher may be reinstated. The 1990 and subsequent amendments to the statute effected a substantial change in the operation of the administrative procedures governing public school teacher tenure. Whereas the board of education used to be charged with addressing issues of teacher termination, it now has very little responsibility in the administrative process. The 1990 amendments limited the responsibilities of the local board of education to paying the tribunal members a per diem and travel expenses, paying for the recording of the hearing, and paying for a transcript of that recording. [6] Under the current version of the statute, the board of education is limited only to paying the per diem and traveling expenses. [7] The superintendent's power has been similarly curtailed since 1990 and has been limited to initiation of the termination of a teacher's contract or other sanctions, and to the discretion to suspend a teacher pending the outcome of such termination proceedings. [8] The primary thrust of the amendments, however, was to transfer responsibility for the administrative hearing as to charges of insubordination, incompetence, et cetera against a teacher to a neutral tribunal. The tribunal is made up of persons from outside of the school district and is ad hoc in nature in that a new tribunal is convened for each hearing. [9] As to the tribunal's mandate, we first note that the amendments to KRS 161.790 fundamentally changed the way in which the administrative hearing worked by vesting ultimate power over the termination of a teacher's contract with the tribunal. We recognize that KRS 161.790 does not contain an express grant of this power, but we have no doubt that the statute completely transfers authority over teacher termination to the tribunal. For example, though the statute makes reference to the tribunal as the finder of fact, [10] which would seem to imply that the tribunal can only determine the factual disputes underlying the superintendent's choice to terminate, other portions of the statute assume that the tribunal has the power to control the termination decision itself: If after the hearing the decision of the tribunal is against termination of the contract, the suspended teacher shall be paid his full salary for any period of suspension. [11] Though we did not make this specific point in our earlier Reis case, it provides further support for our interpretation of the tribunal's power in that case, which we reaffirm here: The remaining powers of hearing the teacher's answer to the charge and terminating the teacher's contract by a majority vote, for so long within the sole province of the board of education, now reside in the three-member tribunal appointed by the chief state school officer. Basically, . . . [the] new composition of KRS 161.790 removes all control from the board of education when passing upon the recommendation of the superintendent to terminate a teacher. [12] As such, it is clear that once a teacher challenges the superintendent's charges, the tribunal has exclusive control over whether to terminate a teacher's contract. The question, then, is whether the tribunal can impose lesser sanctions instead of terminating the teacher's contract. The Court of Appeals has previously addressed this specific issue. In Gallatin County Board of Education v. Mann , [13] the Court of Appeals held that a tribunal convened under KRS 161.790 has inherent authority to modify the sanction to be imposed on a teacher. The Court of Appeals recognized that the 1990 amendment to the statute deleted the specific authorization to modify the sanction [14] that had previously resided in the board of education, but then noted that our pronouncement in Reis that control of termination of a contract resides in the tribunal, meant that neither the superintendent nor the board of education has a right of control over the tribunal. [15] The Court of Appeals, in turn, interpreted the statute's transfer of control over termination of a teacher's contract to mean that the tribunal has inherent authority to modify the employment sanction recommended by the superintendent . . . . [16] While a claim that an agency has inherent authority may be problematic in light of the general principle of agency law that administrative agencies are creatures of statute and must find within the statute warrant for the exercise of any authority which they claim, [17] we agree with the Court of Appeals, whose underlying point is correct: KRS 161.790 cannot be read in a reasonable way so as to exclude from the tribunal the power to alter the sanctions recommended by the superintendent. First, we note that in addition to allowing the superintendent to impose termination, the statute allows the superintendent to impose other sanctions, including suspension without pay, public reprimand, and private reprimand, as alternatives to termination. [18] The teacher has the same right to challenge these alternative sanctions, with the exception of a private reprimand, before the tribunal as he or she does to challenge termination. [19] Thus, just as the statute's grant of power to the tribunal to hear challenges to terminations contains the ultimate power to control termination of a teacher's contract, the grant of authority to hear challenges to lesser sanctions also confers on the tribunal exclusive control over imposition of those lesser sanctions. The power to address termination and the power to address lesser sanctions are parallel and coextensive. The clear intent in including both of these powers is to have the tribunal decide all issues of teacher discipline, with the sole exception of private reprimands. For these parallel powers to have any meaning, the tribunal must be able to exercise them as alternatives to each other in the same proceeding. As such, the tribunal's power to modify the sanction imposed by the superintendent is not an inherent authority of the tribunal as an administrative entity, but rather it is necessarily included in the grant of the dual powers to hear appeals of termination of a teacher's contract and to hear appeals of lesser sanctions. The mere fact that the statute allows the superintendent to choose between pursuing termination and lesser sanctions as alternatives does not remove from the tribunal the power to address lesser sanctions when the superintendent chooses to pursue termination. Otherwise, control over teacher discipline remains under the control of the superintendent, and thus the board. For example, under the Board's proposed interpretation of the statute, i.e., that the tribunal lacks the power to impose lesser sanctions when termination is challenged, if the superintendent proposes termination and the teacher successfully challenges the sanction, then the tribunal would then be limited only to deciding against termination. But because double jeopardy does not apply to civil administrative proceedings, [20] a category into which teacher disciplinary proceedings no doubt fall, the superintendent could then impose alternative lesser sanctions based on the same factual allegations pursuant to KRS 161.790(10), thus forcing the teacher to mount a second challenge to the same charges. Or, in an even more perverse twist, the superintendent could simply impose termination again in the hopes of finding favor before a friendlier tribunal. Though this latter scenario is unlikely given that the tribunal's decision that termination was not appropriate would likely have the effect of res judicata, the point is presented merely to show the unworkability of the Board's proposed interpretation. The more likely scenario, the pursuit of lesser sanctions in a second proceeding, however, also demonstrates that the Board's interpretation of the statute creates an utterly inefficient procedure for teacher discipline, and it frustrates the purpose of the statute, i.e., to shift determination of teacher discipline issues to a neutral administrative body. Furthermore, as the Court of Appeals noted in Mann , this understanding is consistent with administrative procedures in other contexts. [21] In City of Louisville v. Milligan , [22] we addressed whether KRS 90.190 gave the city civil service board authority to impose a lesser disciplinary sanction than that imposed by the appointing authority. KRS 90.190(2), which provides that [t]he board shall investigate and determine the justification for all suspensions in excess of ten (10) days, or dismissals, [23] contains a procedure similar to that in KRS 161.790, but, like KRS 161.790, it does not include express authorization for imposition of a lesser sanction. Nonetheless, we held: The Board is the final administrative reviewing authority of disciplinary actions. It is the duty of the Board to determine from the evidence whether there has been misconduct and also to ascertain whether the disciplinary action was justified under all the facts and circumstances. The power of the Board to modify discipline which is unjustified in the opinion of the Board is consistent with the legislative intent of the General Assembly as found by the Court of Appeals. K.R.S. 90.190(2) does not limit the authority of the Board to modify the penalty against a classified employee.... ... The power to modify discipline is reasonably necessary and appropriate to effect the express powers of the civil service board. To hold otherwise would be to frustrate the purpose of the civil service system. [24] KRS 161.790 is fundamentally similar to KRS 90.190both statutes intend to create a tenure system for public employees by vesting an administrative entity with the power to address disciplinary matters. As such, we can only conclude that the reasoning in Milligan applies with equal force to KRS 161.790. The power to control teacher discipline that the tribunal enjoys under KRS 161.790 includes the power to modify the sanctions imposed by the superintendent. Finally, we must note that the amendments to the statute, by combining the good behavior tenure provisions with a neutral arbiter of the dispute, is obviously intended to create an administrative agency, or civil service board, to address matters of teacher discipline. As we have previously noted, [t]he true purpose of a civil service or merit system concerning public employees ... [is] that civil service systems were established to control the unfettered discretion of elected and appointed officials in public employment. [25] The amendments also remove the potential conflict of interest that would no doubt arise from the fact that it is the board of education, through its agent, the superintendent, that seeks termination of the teacher's contract. [26] We must also note that the amendments to the statute are part of the extensive educational reforms that the General Assembly has enacted to bring Kentucky's public schools into conformity with their constitutional requirements of Section 183 of the Kentucky Constitution as required by our decision in Rose v. Council for Better Education, Inc. [27] Administrative entities are often an effective means of handling complex matters. By shifting the hearing to a neutral tribunal, the amendments aim to increase efficiency in the process by freeing the board of education, whose primary responsibility is governance of the entire local school system, from the burden of holding a complex and lengthy hearing relating only to individual matters, and by delegating responsibility for the hearing to an administrative entity whose sole purpose is to hear the case. [28] Though we are mindful of the fact that as an administrative entity, the tribunal is a creature[] of statute and must find within the statute warrant for the exercise of any authority which [it] claim[s], [29] this understanding of the principles underlying administrative entities colors our interpretation of the tribunal's enabling statute, for what better way is there to effect such principles than to remove completely the authority to control teacher discipline and to give that authority to the tribunal. This appears to have been the clear purpose of the statute. We conclude that the current version of KRS 161.790 allows the superintendent to allege facts constituting charges of cause against teachers and to impose sanctions in conformity with those charges. But once the teacher chooses to challenge the charges and sanctions, the superintendent is limited to presenting evidence of the charges and recommending a sanction, much like a prosecutor in a criminal case, and the decision both as to the facts of the charges and the appropriate sanction is vested wholly in the tribunal. The tribunal has the discretion to accept or reject the sanction proposed by the superintendent and the discretion to impose an alternative or less severe sanction.