There’s a difference between what is legal and what is fair

The recent non-renewal of the supplemental contract of Ferris basketball coach Don Van Lierop is cause for great concern.

Van Lierop was notified on May 14 that his contract for coaching basketball would not be renewed. No reason was given for the non-renewal. A school district official was quoted as saying that the district has decided to go in a “different direction” with the Ferris basketball program.

Attempts by a group of Van Lierop’s supporters to find out the reasons behind the non-renewal have run into a brick wall. The district administration is hiding behind contract language that states that all extracurricular contracts are one-year contracts and refuses to discuss the issue further.

While this procedure may be technically allowable under contract language, it is bad policy and even worse human relations to treat employees in this manner. All of the head coaches at Ferris High School signed a letter protesting this process and calling for a full and open investigation. District officials have denied our requests.

We are concerned that the handling of this case has set a dangerous precedent. Here are the facts of this case, as we know them:

A group of disgruntled parents met with Emmett Arndt, Executive Director of Teaching and Learning for Spokane Public Schools, to discuss Van Lierop and the basketball program. At that meeting, a large amount of written material was given to Mr. Arndt by the parent group. At a subsequent meeting, other district officials examined this written material. District officials then met with building-level administrators and further reviewed this written material. A short time later, the principal was directed to deliver a letter to Van Lierop informing him that his basketball contract would not be renewed.

In spite of all of this, the school district officials maintain that there has not been an investigation and that Van Lierop has not been disciplined. The coaches in the building vehemently disagree with this interpretation. We believe that the exchange of written information constitutes an investigation, albeit a rather one-sided investigation. Information has been exchanged and Van Lierop’s dismissal was related to that exchange of information. Yet, even Van Lierop has not been allowed to see the written material or respond to it.

Even in the McCarthy era, the accused were allowed to know their accusers and what they had been accused of, and they were allowed to respond to those accusations in a public forum.

Due process and the protection of the rights of the accused have long been important values in the United States of America. Apparently the administration of Spokane Public Schools does not share these values.

Unfortunately, even the Spokane Education Association seems to be willing to accept the district’s warped logic regarding one-year contracts. This is disappointing, to say the least. While all extracurricular contracts are indeed one-year contracts, it is the usual process that those contracts are pretty much automatically renewed. Therefore, non-renewal can be viewed as a form of discipline.

If the NAACP had taken this kind of hands-off approach to segregation, “separate but equal” would still be the law of the land and Rosa Parks would still be sitting at the back of the bus. At the time of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the NAACP had filed thousands of cases dealing with school segregation. The courts immediately rejected most of these cases. But the NAACP did not give up. They continued to research and file cases. In 1954 they were finally able to convince the Supreme Court that “separate but equal” was bad policy and Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned.

Rather than simply accept the district’s position, we would like to challenge the SEA to push for change. We think the SEA should come out strongly in favor of honest, open, fair exchange of information and reasonable protection of due process rights for coaches and others working under one-year contracts. While similar cases in the past may give little hope that the process will change, we believe that the union has an ethical responsibility to recognize bad policy where it exists and endeavor to change it.

Clearly, this is a case where what is legal and what is fair are not the same. The school district should be ashamed of hiding behind bad policy and setting a dubious standard for future cases.

Secret meetings behind closed doors; refusal to undertake full, fair, and open investigations; and withholding information from employees related to action taken against them is all bad policy. This is something we would expect to see in Castro’s Cuba or Stalin’s Soviet Union, not something we would expect to see in “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

In keeping with principles of fairness and due process, we would encourage the administration of Spokane Public Schools to reevaluate the process and decisions made in this case.