HOUSTON – As school districts across Texas brace for state budget cuts, thousands of senior teaching jobs are safe.
At least for now.
That’s because many of the most experienced teachers in Texas have “continuing contracts” – deals that were struck more than a decade ago to help retain them. The contracts have been replaced by almost every district in the state – partly because Texas has become increasingly anti-union.
The board of education for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District just voted to eliminate such contracts last week. The Houston Independent School District, the state’s largest, hasn’t allowed them for new teachers for more than a decade.
But when the contracts were eliminated, teachers were grandfathered in. That means that in HISD, about a quarter of current teachers still have them, according to a recent report by The Texas Tribune.
In the Cy-Fair Independent School District, that number shoots up to 70 percent – about 4,800 of the district’s 6,800 teachers have the so-called continuing contracts.
Critics call the contracts the equivalent of tenure, meaning that teachers who have them can’t be laid off, except in extreme circumstances. The contracts automatically renew every year.
“I don't think teachers should be guaranteed a job just because they chose a profession,” said Sandra Braddy, a parent of former students at Cy-Fair ISD. “I think they should have to be a quality teacher."
But teachers’ unions argue that’s exactly what the contracts were for – ensuring that quality teachers stuck around.
"It benefited the district to have a continuing contract because the teacher felt like, 'OK, I don't need to be job searching all the time,’" said Joanna Pasternak, a representative for the Houston Federation of Teachers.
Pasternak strongly disagreed that the contracts amounted to “tenure.”
"Tenure is for college professors,” she said. “There is no tenure. It's just a continuing contract, meaning you have the expectation of having a job in the fall."
If – and that’s a big “if” – lawmakers follow through on their proposed cuts to public education, districts will likely be forced to lay off teachers. The continuing contracts are part of the reason why younger teachers will probably bear the brunt of those cuts.
Kelli Durham, the superintendent of communications for the Cy-Fair ISD, said that the board’s decision to eliminate the contracts for future hires has nothing to do with the state’s current budget crisis. She said the plan had been in the works for years.
Durham also told 11 News that it might be possible to override some of the contracts if the board of education declares an official “reduction in force,” a procedural step before laying off teachers.
However, seniority would still play a large role in deciding who would be let go, according to union officials in both the Cy-Fair ISD and HISD.
The details of the union contracts are complicated, but Durham said the bottom line was that nobody in the Cy-Fair administration wants the legislature to pass the drastic cuts in the first place.
