Day v. South Park Independent School Dist.
| Decision Date | 16 August 1985 |
| Docket Number | No. 84-2119,84-2119 |
| Citation | 768 F.2d 696 |
| Parties | 26 Ed. Law Rep. 947 Mavis DAY, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. SOUTH PARK INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT, Defendant-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit |
Robert E. Hall, Houston, Tex., Robert H. Chanin and Gary L. Sasso, Washington, D.C., for plaintiff-appellant.
Wells, Peyton, Beard, Greenberg, Hunt & Crawford, Tanner T. Hunt, Jr., Beaumont, Tex., for defendant-appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Before RUBIN, WILLIAMS, and DAVIS, Circuit Judges.
The first amendment protects freedom of speech and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. An untenured school teacher asserts that these rights were violated when her contract was not renewed because she protested her principal's unfavorable evaluation of her performance. The facts support the district court's conclusion that her actions, whether viewed as speech, petitioning, or both, related only to her superior's employment decisions that affected her in a purely personal manner not to matters of political, social, or community concern. We affirm his conclusion that the teacher was, therefore, not shielded by the first amendment from the school board's decision not to renew her contract. Constitutional rights deserve solicitous protection but the Constitution does not secure every governmental employee from adverse employment action, and it does not guarantee federal relief to every state employee who is injured, even improperly, by a decision made in the course of an employment relationship.
Mavis Day, an untenured English teacher at Hebert High School in the South Park Independent School District who had been employed for one and two-year periods, filed this suit under the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983, asserting that the School District violated her first and fourteenth amendment rights by refusing to renew her contract for the 1980-1981 school year after she complained about her performance evaluation and filed a grievance. Her evidence warrants these factual conclusions.
In March, 1980, the principal of Hebert High made an evaluation of Day's teaching performance for the 1979-1980 school year, as he was required to do for all teachers. In eighteen of the twenty-four skills and personality characteristics evaluated, Day received a satisfactory rating, with positive comments dispersed throughout the evaluation form. In the other six categories, which mainly concern attitude toward school policies and relations with colleagues, Day received an unsatisfactory rating. Some of the principal's comments were: a "[l]ack of control in working with peers is often evident," and He recommended that Day be transferred because "[t]his teacher may function better in a different environment."
Day and the principal met on March 13 for an evaluation conference, but the principal did not explain the negative aspects of Day's evaluation to her satisfaction. Four days later, Day wrote a letter to the principal detailing her dissatisfaction with the negative evaluation and asking for specific illustrations of how her attitude had been unsatisfactory, so that she might improve it. The principal did not respond to Day's request. Day then challenged the evaluation by invoking the School District's formal grievance procedure.
Statement of Policy 4020, which outlines the formal grievance procedure, defines a grievance in the following manner:
A "grievance" is a petition by a teacher or a group of teachers based upon an alleged violation, misinterpretation, or inequitable application of any existing policies, rules, or regulations of the school district, but shall not include a petition based upon disciplinary action not directly based on policies of the Board of the District.
Policy 4020 then states that an aggrieved teacher will first discuss a problem with the appropriate principal and that, if the matter is not resolved informally, "formal procedures may then be instituted." After outlining the levels of the grievance structure, Policy 4020 states: "No reprisals of any kind shall be taken by either party or by any member of the Administration against any party in interest, any school representative, or any other participant in the grievance procedure by reason of such participation."
Day invoked Level One of the grievance procedure on March 28, 1980, by submitting her grievance in writing to the principal, and, when the principal did not respond within the time limit dictated by Policy 4020, she submitted her grievance to the superintendent. Both grievances refer to "solving problems connected with my evaluation." The superintendent responded by letter, stating that Day's complaint was not "grievable."
At trial, the superintendent testified that the School District has a policy against entertaining grievances concerning teacher evaluations because it is the principal's responsibility to evaluate his teachers and officials higher in the administration cannot make a determination of the correctness of the teacher's point of view as opposed to the principal's. The formal grievance procedure might be invoked only if the principal violated Board policy in the process, for example, by refusing to evaluate a teacher or to sign the evaluation form. This was supported by other testimony at trial, although no School District policy statement explicitly makes this distinction.
After Day received the superintendent's response, she requested arbitration, as the procedural guidelines in Policy 4020 permit. Her request was denied by the board of trustees because "dissatisfaction ... with one's evaluation is not a grievable complaint under board policy # 4020, or under any other provision of district policy."
By letter, the assistant superintendent advised Day in May that the School District had decided not to renew her contract for the 1980-1981 school year. At trial, the School District produced testimony that this decision was based on declining enrollment, a decision to eliminate one teaching position in the English Department at Hebert and the fact that "Day was the least senior among English teachers whose contracts expired in 1980." Day adduced testimony that the contract of an English teacher who had taught at Hebert for only one year had been renewed for the school year and that the principal told this teacher not to "associate with controversial people" because "he was going to rid himself of these controversial people, and unless [she] wanted to be in the same predicament [she] should watch who [she] associated with." This English teacher testified that she understood that Day was one of these "controversial people."
Day appealed to the State Commissioner of Education challenging the School District's refusal to arbitrate her grievance, and she subsequently appealed the School District's nonrenewal decision. While the appeals were pending, the School District agreed to expunge the 1980 evaluation from its records, and, with Day's consent, the State Commissioner entered an order requiring this and dismissing the appeal concerning the evaluation. After a hearing, the Commissioner rejected Day's challenge to her nonrenewal. Day appealed this decision to the State Board of Education, which found: (1) the School District's policies prohibit retaliation for an employee's exercise of grievance rights; (2) the record contains some evidence supporting the allegation that the principal's recommendation for nonrenewal was given in retaliation for Day's exercise of her grievance rights; and (3) the School District has not conducted a hearing to determine whether Day's nonrenewal resulted from a violation of School District policy. The Board of Education ordered the School District to conduct a hearing on the matter and remanded for that purpose. On remand, the School District decided that Day's claim should be "deferred for arbitration" but that such arbitration should not take place until the case sub judice is finally adjudicated.
At trial, Day sought to prove that the School District decided not to renew her contract in order to retaliate against her for filing a grievance and that this violated her first amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. After Day rested, the district court granted the School District's motion for a directed verdict. The court concluded that under Connick v. Meyers 1 and Pickering v. Board of Education, 2 Day's speech activities did not warrant first amendment protection because they did not relate to a matter of public concern and because the "essence of the protest" did not involve the grievance procedure or School District policy. The court concluded that Day's complaint was purely a matter of a disagreement with the merits of the rating. It also found that a substantial reason for the nonrenewal of her contract was that she complained to the principal and filed a grievance and that her contract would have been renewed but for her complaint on "a purely private matter."
The trial court further concluded that the right to redress of grievances "is so dovetailed into" the question of whether the speech is protected that it could not distinguish between them. Although the court found that the right to redress of grievances "exists for protected speech," it concluded that it was obligated by law to rule for the School District in this case. The court also saw no violation of due process in the evidence presented to that point in the case.
Only the redress of grievances issue is raised on appeal: whether a public employee's complaint to her superior about her teaching evaluation is protected by the petition clause of the first amendment. Because the district court rendered a directed verdict, we view all of the evidence "in the light and with all...
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