ADVERSE EMPLOYMENT ACTIONS AND PUBLIC SCHOOL ...

In Snipes v. McAndrew, (1984 S.C.), Snipes and Shaw mistakenly referred to tenured
teacher due process protections in contesting their reassignments. They were not entitled to
evidentiary hearings as they posited. Peterson, like Snipes and Shaw, failed on his claim for an
evidentiary hearing by wrongly citing the Fourteenth Amendment, which does not outline
evidentiary hearings as a requirement to fulfill due process in Peterson v. Unified School District
(1989 U.S. Dist.). In Tazewell County School Board v. Brown (2004 Va.), Brown erringly
requested an evidentiary hearing prior to fulfilling all the steps in the school system’s grievance
procedures process. Brown’s level jumping invalidated his claim for an evidentiary hearing. To
receive an evidentiary hearing in most instances, an administrator must have exhausted almost all
prior grievance avenues as they are expensive undertakings and not guaranteed to administrators.
First Amendment claims. Table 54 represents another safeguard cited by 15% of the
administrators in the case sampling. Nineteen cases included administrators claiming that their
First Amendment rights had been violated as the school systems had retaliated against them for
speech the administrators asserted was of a public concern. These cases had to survive the
Pickering balancing test for their claims to be heard. That data showed that few were able to do
so. The school system prevailed on 58% (11) of these cases in full and in part on 90% (17) of
these cases. The adverse employment actions cited were evenly spread with six non-renewals,
six reassignments, and seven terminations.
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