In February 2008, a Sarasota, Florida special education teacher was arrested and charged with four counts of child abuse following allegations made by two aides in her classroom who had witnessed dozens of incidents in which the teacher hit, kicked, pushed and generally abused the severely disabled students in her class.

Eventually the teacher was acquitted on the criminal charges, but Sarasota School Superintendent Lori White still believed the teacher should be fired. The teacher fought the dismissal, the local union went to bat for her, and the case made its way up the legal ladder.

The local union argued that discharging the teacher was not justified for two reasons. First, they claimed that the district had no "just cause" for immediate dismissal because her conduct did not constitute a "real immediate danger to the district."* Second, the union maintained that her firing violated her due process rights under the district's collaborative bargaining agreement, since there weren't a lot of warnings leading up to the dismissal.

Although the arbitrator found the abuse charges "credible," he agreed with the union's argument and reversed the dismissal. After a four-week suspension and some counseling, the teacher was allowed to return to teaching and to her $80,000 a year salary.

Apparently the abuse inflicted by the teacher was not nearly as compelling to the arbitrator as the technical mistakes made by the school district in making its case against the teacher.

What sort of fatal mistakes? First, the aides had held off reporting the abuse, as they chose instead to build a case over four months in which they kept a daily log. Their prolonged silence, the defense maintained, argued against the severity of the teacher's actions. Second, while the principal had also suspected the teacher of abusing students and warned her in a meeting not to "hit, hurt, or treat the students roughly in any way," she had never transferred that verbal warning into writing or alerted the teacher that the meeting was classified as disciplinary.

We think there's a more fundamental problem revealed in this decision, one having to do with noneducators deciding what constitutes professional behavior of educators. It doesn't seem as if it should take an educator to reach the common sense judgment that a teacher who inflicts a "back-handed slap to a student's head" should not be permitted to continue to teach children, but there's ample evidence that the court system routinely can't get it right.

What's next for this teacher? The Florida Department of Education is investigating whether or not to revoke this teacher's license--a process that could take months or even years--but for now this teacher will remain on the job.

*We didn't know that it was the district's health, not the student's health, that was at stake. Sarcasm aside, it is exactly these odd choices of words in dismissal language that ends up getting many teachers off the hook on a technicality when the case is considered in the court system. How these provisions get worded is critical.

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