Opinion ID: 1704346
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: political or personal reasons

Text: Title 52, § 358, as amended, provides: Cancellation of an employment contract with a teacher on continuing service status may be made for incompetency, insubordination, neglect of duty, immorality, justifiable decrease in the number of teaching positions, or other good and just cause; but cancellation may not be made for political or personal reasons. The pertinent part of the decision of the Commission was: After reviewing the record and hearing the arguments of counsel, the Commission finds the following: The Commission is of the opinion that the cancellation of Mr. Arthur Baugh's contract by the Marshall County Board of Education as Principal of Albertville High School was motivated by political or personal reasons, and is therefore in conflict with Title 52, Section 358, Code of Alabama 1940. The Commission makes no finding as to the competency or incompetency of Mr. Baugh, neither does the Commission make any finding as to whether or not Mr. Baugh was guilty of insubordination as charged by the Board. The words political and personal have many different meanings. The definition of personal reasons as used in the statute under consideration, cited in 32 Words & Phrases, Personal Reasons, Pocket Part, p. 63, is that which the Court of Civil Appeals retracted in the opinion presently before us for review. We make no attempt to give the various definitions and distinctions found in the dictionary and court decisions. We think it is generally understood among laymen as well as lawyers what the Legislature meant when it added the provisions in §§ 357 and 358 that the transfer or cancellation of the contract should not be made for political or personal reasons. We think the political reasons the Legislature had in mind in the use of the words in these statutes were that no tenured teacher could be transferred or discharged on the ground that the teacher did not belong to the same political party that a majority of the board members belonged, or that the teacher had voted for a political opponent of the board, or that the teacher had or had not professed a political preference in any political race, or that the teacher had become a candidate for public office, or for any similar political activity we have not specifically mentioned. In short, the Board cannot indirectly punish a teacher for that teacher's political activity or that teacher's refraining from political activity. It is common knowledge that whenever anyone on the public payroll is involuntarily transferred to another job or discharged, or even when charges are preferred, the inevitable response is that the reason is politics. And the claim of politics becomes more shrill when the hirer and firer is a body of elected officials and that body has to take its action by a majority vote. Under our statutes, no tenured teacher can be transferred or discharged without a majority vote of the Board of Education, and that holding cannot be affirmed or rejected by the Tenure Commission except by majority vote. But those mere facts do not make either body's action political in the sense it is used in the statute. We think the word personal as used in the tenure statute denotes a personal bias, prejudice, or antipathy on the part of one or more of the Board members toward the teacher; and when it influences a Board member's vote when that member is exercising a quasi-judicial function in voting on a transfer or cancellation. Personal is in contrast with judicial; it characterizes an attitude of extrajudicial origin. There are two sides to the political and personal reasons coin. If a tenured teacher, regardless of how incompetent he may have become, decided that he did not want his contract cancelled, he could once a year publicly criticize the actions of the Board (political) and castigate the integrity of the Board members (personal) and always show that any attempt to get rid of him was for political and personal reasons, but we do not think any Tenure Commission or any court would set aside a cancellation of his contract on that showing if, in fact, he was incompetent. The Court of Civil Appeals quoted at length from State v. Board of Education of Fairfield, 252 Ala. 254, 40 So.2d 689, to support its holding that a tenured teacher cannot have his contract cancelled by the Board if the Superintendent of Education has political or personal reasons for wanting the teacher's contract cancelled, but no evidence is listed that the Board acted for those reasons. We do not think the Fairfield case so holds. In that case, the teacher sought to show that the Superintendent had a personal dislike for her and refused to let her take a test when he had permitted other teachers to take it at a subsequent date from the date originally set. The Superintendent also refused to answer questions which could have shown bias or prejudice against the teacher. This court held that the hearing served the purpose of enabling the board of education to hear both sides of the case and that the teacher was entitled to have the Superintendent answer these questions. His answers thereto could have materially affected the final decision of the board of education. (Emphasis supplied.) But the teacher was prevented from presenting evidence tending to show that the proceedings to cancel her contract, which was cancelled because of insubordination, were motivated by personal reasons. Certainly, she should have been permitted to show, if she could, the personal feeling of the Superintendent toward her. But unless she could show a carry-over of that dislike to the members of the board, she would not be able to attribute political or personal reasons to the board, the only people who could cancel her contract for insubordination. We cannot agree with petitioner that the words in the last clause of § 358, but cancellation may not be made for political or personal reasons are meaningless surplusage. We have tried to show that the Legislature put them there for a purpose, and they should be considered and applied, but as we shall show later, they are not so dominantly important as to nullify all Board actions. We think the Legislature intended that no teacher should be transferred or have his contract cancelled if his transfer either was grounded exclusively or primarily on political or personal reasons.