Contract Not renewed...is do I call it a firing or dismissal or what? (license, educator)
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For what it's worth, I applaud you for maintaining strict standards. If a school doesn't like that, it says more about the school than you. In all honesty, demanding the best your students are capable of from them shouldn't be something that puts you at odds with administrators, but as we all know, it often does.
My wife got the same Non renewal for a position her first year in FL.
No one would touch her in the district because of non renewal..(She had 3 interviews after the year was over.)
It also didn't help that the person in charge of hiring didn't think anyone with a Non renewal should be hired.
They thought "SOMETHING is wrong and we do not need wrong here."
She now does contract work in her field and enjoys it a lot, but not in the same district.
A non-renewal of a job that potentially has tenure is a firing. There is no other way around it.
Life isn't fair. Take it from somebody who was "dismissed"--fired--illegally by a principal who violated federal and state administrative law. I didn't do anything worth being fired over and didn't even merit an oral reprimand, but the principal was covering up her own incompetence and laziness. This stuff happens all the time. Teachers don't realize how few rights they really have. They assume they have this job security, but they don't have it even when they get continuing contracts (tenure).
I would argue that a non-renewal is worse than a "dismissal" (outside of criminal acts or gross misconduct) because the assumption is if you were considered a good teacher, you would have received tenure. Non-renewals apart from RIFs and temporary contracts are considered career killers.
You would have to move from the area to even be able to resume a career. It is possible, but it is an uphill battle.
It is interesting, the perception of being "terminated" in any career, is that there must be a problem with you. I have seen many good people terminated for personality issues, or situational issues.
One of the saddest cases I ever saw was a new teacher, young, plain, overweight, religious, supervised by a teacher who was thin, attractive, not religious. They clashed. And the young teacher was fired. Nothing she did wrong, just totally mismatched. The supervisng teacher wrote a scathing review, and she was not offerred a contract for the next year. It did destroy her teaching career. She did not want to move, and with that review in her file, no principal would hire her.
Flip side of that, I worked at a place early in my career, that treated all SPED students like lepers. We had the smallest, worst classroom in the school. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, furthest away from a bathroom, or even running water. I advocated for my students, and knew I was not going to be re-newed. Ha, I quit and found another job. I stayed until the end of the school year though.
When in college, I worked in several student service positions where you had semester to semester or year to year appointments. Per the agreement at the university, students had to re-apply for the position each year. At the end of my appointment, I would usually find another new appointment so I did not re-apply for my old position. When I am filling out an application, I would just state that I had a one year appointment and I pursued new opportunities at the completion of my appointment.
In your case, I think you should just say that you had a one year contract that was contingent on a variety of factors, and after your contract was completed, it was not renewed.
In your case, I think you should just say that you had a one year contract that was contingent on a variety of factors, and after your contract was completed, it was not renewed.
This is very good advice. There are very many teaching positions that are advertised as one-year only, and quite frankly, every teaching position is one-year only until you are tenured because your contract is for only 1 year.
Twenty years ago when I first got into teaching in another state, there was a very large and attractive school district that required non-tenured teachers to reapply for their job each spring, go through interview process, etc. until they were tenured. As a former member of the business community, I thought it wasn't cost-effective because advertising, recruiting, interviewing, training is SO expensive, but it was their policy.
In our district the union president is contacted first on any nonrenewal by human resources. The president informs the employee they will not be renewed. They are then advised to resign on their own. That way they don't have to check the box on the application asking if they have ever been fired or non renewed.
Pretty crummy but avoids a potential career ending question.
Labor is being abused and a century of labor rights are being washed away. In many ways our "head down" behavior has contributed to this bad behavior. Even our unions have abandoned their mission so that they can "have a seat at the table."
I know many people who are in their 40s and 50s and potential employers have the audacity to ask their age and bring up age as a concern for potential employment. There are many clear violations of labor laws that employers seem unafraid of consequences. The practice of discriminating against people who are unemployed and only hiring applicants who are gainfully employed is another egregious practice.
My husband taught in both GA and FL. In GA, they needed to lay off teachers due to budget cuts, so they forced them to either resign or be fired. They promised a chance at rehire ONLY if you resigned. (of course, if you resigned, you probably didn't get one dime of unemployment!) Teachers were given 1 day to decide this. Getting non-renewed (even for budget issues) was a kiss of death in GA. My husband was not laid off in GA, thankfully. In fact, he was up for tenure when I made the very, very bad decision to move back to FL.
He landed at a school here with very high teacher turnover, and was non-renewed after one year. (before FCAT scores came back) He was told he was coming back and he had good reviews. We found out that this pricipal seems to enjoy having a revolving door of teachers year after year. ??? She would rather have a newbie I guess. Meanwhile, the standardized test scores were released and my husband's results were very high. He used this data to apply for other jobs in the district and was hired for the same grade level at a much better school.
Things are very random in education these days for sure. IMO, it is definately one of the LEAST secure jobs for so many resons right now if you are a non-tenured teacher. (and since tenure is banned now in FL unless you already have it, this will be an annual dance for the rest of your 'career' as a teacher here!)
50% of our reviews are based on the FCAT, but contracts have to be given out before the test scores are available.
This year, we have a huge new evaluation system and the administration is not doing anything even remotely close to what they are supposed to do. My husband hasn't even had one formal evaluation and it's almost March!
This is why education is a mess: Principals very often simply do NOT want the "best" teacher. Instead, they want to hire a relative, or roll the dice with someone who has zero experience. (even though the salary difference here between a 1st year teacher and a 11th year "veteran" is only $3,000.) I used to be a teacher and I kept my head down, just like the others said. You learned that very fast.
Now that teachers in FL will never get tenure, they are pretty much banned from speaking out against fraud, abuse, waste, nepotism, etc. Speak out and your annual contract will be non-renewed. Simple as that. No reason is required when non-renewing someone either, so districts are going to violate state/ federal law with these "annual contracts". You were too fat, too disabled, got cancer, got pregnant, too black, too hard of hearing, too old, etc. NO reason needs to be given and the incompetent HR departments think they can get away with these things. Our district is being sued by an employee for violation of federal law and the EEOC ruled against the district. I used to work in HR and consider what the district did in this case to be a clear violation of the American's with Disabilities Act. Now taxpayers get to pay for whatever the result of this lawsuit is! (BTW, I'm moving away from here soon to a county with a much better school system)
Last edited by MovedfromFL; 02-21-2012 at 12:36 PM..
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