Court Opinion

ID: 9649201
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 14:44:48.923107+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:08.800100
License: Public Domain

*624Peters, J.
(dissenting). I agree with, my colleagues that no literal reading of the various statutes that comprise the Teacher Tenure Act can resolve the difficult question before us. Under these circumstances, I believe that the policy behind the act requires us to adopt the construction that will protect tenured rather than nontenured teachers. I therefore concur in the conclusion reached by the trial court.
The situation with which we are confronted in this case is likely to recur in many communities faced with declining school enrollments. It is clear that local boards of education, rather than courts, are vested with the authority and the discretion to determine how best to respond to changing educational needs and impacted school budgets. It is equally clear that the Teacher Tenure Act was designed to protect employment rights of tenured teachers despite the consequent limitation of the exercise of managerial discretion by school boards. Herzig v. Board of Education, 152 Conn. 144, 151, 204 A.2d 827 (1964). In Delagorges v. Board of Education, 176 Conn. 630, 410 A.2d 461 (1979), we resolved the inevitably continuous conflict between managerial discretion and the principle of tenure to permit school administrators to reassign school personnel without regard to diminution of status or of salary. The issue in this ease, however, goes far beyond Delagorges, for it concerns termination and not reassignment, and thus goes to the heart of the principle of tenure, the preference for retention of teachers who have earned tenure. What is at stake here is whether school boards have unlimited authority to displace competent tenured teachers by competent nontenured teachers. For it is inescapable *625that today’s ease, combined with Delagorges, enables any school board to terminate any tenured teacher by assigning that teacher one year to a position destined to be terminated in the following year. No matter what the bona fide justification for the choice of assignments may be, the fiscal implication of assigning a nontenured rather than a tenured teacher to a position intended to be retained is too apparent to be ignored.
I would therefore read § 10-151 (b) (5), contrary to the view of my colleagues, to require a school board to reassign a tenured teacher whose position has been eliminated to another position in the school system for which that teacher is qualified, if that position is vacant or filled by a nontenured teacher. It is true that $ 10-151 (a) states grounds for the termination of nontenured teachers, and that none of the grounds there enumerated specifically refers to displacement by a teacher with tenure. As we recently held, however, in Tucker v. Board of Education, 177 Conn. 572, 418 A.2d 933 (1979), the sixth stated ground, “other due and sufficient cause,” allows termination, with proper notice, on grounds closely related to, but not explicitly stated by, the statute. If a teacher may legally be terminated for insubordination, although there was no violation of a “reasonable rule of the board of education,” I believe that a nontenured teacher may equally be terminated because the position to which the teacher was appointed must now be surrendered to a teacher with tenure. It should be noted furthermore that readjustments after recognition of the rights of the plaintiff must, in the first instance, be planned and implemented by the defendant board, which has as yet taken no reviewable steps in that direction.
*626Although, each teacher tenure statute differs in its wording from that enacted in other states, the issues arising out of the elimination of the position of a tenured teacher are by no means unique to Connecticut. The great majority of other jurisdictions have construed their statutes, as I think we should construe ours, to give a preference to the retention of tenured over nontenured teachers. See, e.g., Pickens County Board of Education v. Keasler, 263 Ala. 231, 82 So. 2d 197 (1955); Hankenson v. Board of Education, 15 Ill. App. 2d 440, 146 N.E.2d 194 (1957); Watson v. Burnett, 216 Ind. 216, 23 N.E.2d 420 (1939); State ex rel. Marolt v. Independent School District No. 695, 299 Minn. 134, 217 N.W.2d 212 (1974); contra, Fuller v. Berkeley School District, 2 Cal. 2d 152, 40 P.2d 831 (1934).
I would therefore find no error in the judgment of the trial court and would sustain the plaintiff’s appeal from the decision of the defendant board.