Personnel Com. v. Board of Education
| Decision Date | 20 September 1990 |
| Docket Number | No. B039925,B039925 |
| Citation | 223 Cal.App.3d 1463,273 Cal.Rptr. 288 |
| Court | California Court of Appeals Court of Appeals |
| Parties | , 62 Ed. Law Rep. 1093 PERSONNEL COMMISSION OF THE LYNWOOD UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE LYNWOOD UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, Defendant and Appellant. |
Brown and Conradi, William E. Brown, San Diego, and Penn Foote, Burlingame, for defendant and appellant.
Hill, Farrer & Burrill, Darlene Fischer Phillips and Deborah A. Sanowski, Los Angeles, for plaintiff and respondent.
Robert S. Gerstein, Los Angeles, for amicus curiae.
May the governing board of a merit system school district reduce the workweek of the district's personnel director? After rehearing this question, we conclude that the district's personnel commission alone, rather than its governing board, has the authority to appoint, supervise and determine the workweek of the personnel director. Accordingly, we affirm the trial court's judgment ordering the Lynwood Board of Education to restore the personnel director of its school district to full-time status.
On April 26, 1988, the members of the Board of Education of the Lynwood Unified School District (the Board) voted unanimously to reduce the position of the director of classified personnel to a half-time position, and transferred a portion of the duties performed by the director to another office in the district. At the time, the position of director of classified personnel was vacant.
Six weeks after the Board took this action, the Personnel Commission of the Lynwood Unified School District (the Commission) hired William Hartford to fill the still-vacant position of personnel director. The minutes of the Commission meeting held on June 2, 1988, indicate that Hartford was hired as a full-time employee. On June 14, 1988, however, the Board voted to approve/ratify the employment of Hartford as a half-time employee. When Hartford began work on June 20, 1988, he was informed that he would only be paid for 20 hours per week and not as a full-time personnel director.
The Commission then filed the petition for a writ of mandate at issue here, seeking to compel the Board to rescind its action reducing the personnel director to a half-time position. The Commission also sought a declaration stating that it alone is empowered to hire a personnel director on a basis which it determines is appropriate, and that the Board has no power to reduce that position. The grounds for the petition were that the statutes governing the operation and duties of the Board and the Commission made the Board's action illegal.
On June 30, 1988, the trial court issued an alternative writ commanding the Board to pay the personnel director a full-time salary until the court ruled on the merits of the petition. The Board filed a demurrer to the petition which was overruled by the trial court on September 9, 1988. The court granted judgment for the Commission on December 9, 1988, and issued a peremptory writ of mandate stating that the Board had abused its discretion by reducing the personnel director to half time, and ordering the Board to give full-time status and salary to Hartford.
The Board appeals.
Code of Civil Procedure section 1085, the "traditional" mandamus statute, may be invoked when, as here, a party seeks judicial review of nonadjudicatory administrative actions. 1 Judicial intervention is warranted when a public entity adopts a rule or makes a policy decision of general application which is shown to be arbitrary, capricious, contrary to public policy, unlawful, or procedurally unfair. Whether the action is tainted by one or more of these factors is a question of law. With respect to these questions the trial and appellate courts perform essentially the same function, and the determinations of the trial court are not conclusive on appeal. (Lewin v. St. Joseph Hospital of Orange (1978) 82 Cal.App.3d 368, 386-387, 146 Cal.Rptr. 892; American Canyon Fire Protection Dist. v. County of Napa (1983) 141 Cal.App.3d 100, 106, 190 Cal.Rptr. 189.)
As a general rule, the governing board of a school district, in this case the Lynwood Board of Education, has a duty to "employ, pay, and otherwise control the services" of classified employees. (Ed.Code, § 45241.) 2 The personnel director is a classified employee. (§ 45104.) However, in a district which has adopted a merit system, the Board's authority over classified employees does not extend to those persons employed as part of a personnel commission staff. (§ 45109.) 3
Because the members of the Commission's staff are expressly exempted from Board supervision, this duty falls to the Commission itself. Section 45264 states that
The personnel director is clearly an employee who performs activities as part of the operation of the personnel commission, within the meaning of section 45264. Specifically, he or she is "responsible to the commission for carrying out all procedures in the administration of the classified personnel," is the secretary of the commission, and is responsible for preparing an annual report sent by the commission to the school board. (§ 45266.)
Thus, although there is broad language in the Education Code regarding the Board's control over the...
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