Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

NIC settles with former instructors

Taryn Brodwater Staff writer

North Idaho College’s insurer reached a settlement last week with two former instructors who lost their jobs when the college made cuts to its Computer Information Technology program this spring.

Until the agreement is signed by all parties, Idaho Counties Risk Management Plan will not release the amount paid to instructors Susan Andrews and Janet Anderson-Kluss as part of that settlement.

The college and its attorney said details of the agreement were confidential. The former Computer Information Technology – or CITE – instructors and their attorney could not be reached Thursday.

Andrews and Anderson-Kluss were tenured instructors at NIC. Because they had tenure, they should have been reassigned to another position or granted a hearing when the college eliminated their positions, said Nick Gier, a University of Idaho professor and president of the Idaho Federation of Teachers’ Higher Education Council.

The IFT provided the attorney who represented the instructors.

“We’re confident that we will get a very good settlement for them,” Gier said. But he said the settlement may be little consolation to “two outstanding instructors whose lives have been turned upside down.”

“(North Idaho College) treated these two employees as if they were nontenured and were hired at the will of the administration,” Gier said. “This has been a real lesson for the college and also an educational process for the faculty to see how important tenure is for them.”

North Idaho College is the only community college in Idaho to offer tenure and is the only public college or university in the state to extend that offer to professional-technical instructors.

Jerry Gee, NIC’s vice president for instruction, said the college has chosen to offer tenure to all instructors, academic or professional-technical.

“The college has wanted to paint the picture and still wants to paint the pictures that we’ve got a united faculty,” Gee said. “They’re all important.”

But Gee said the college doesn’t consider tenure a guarantee of employment.

The Idaho State Division of Vocational Education’s policies recommend that the state’s higher education institutions give professional-technical instructors annual contracts rather than grant tenure.

According to those policies, granting tenure to professional-technical instructors “unduly limits, and often precludes, the ability of an institution to … adapt to the ever-changing education and training needs of today’s technologically oriented workplace.”

Gier said he rejects that argument. He said tenure protects academic instructors and allows them to use new teaching techniques and express views that may be unpopular, and that the same right should be extended to professional-technical instructors.

Gee said the college has yet to formally discussed changing its tenure policy to limit tenure to academic instructors. But, he said, “at some point in time we may need to take a look at it.”

In April, Andrews said she was hoping for a positive resolution and to remain at NIC as an employee.

“I worked very hard to become tenured here,” Andrews said at the time. She was a former NIC student and had worked at NIC since 1993.

Andrews said she was called into Gee’s office on March 22 and handed a letter.

“I was opening the letter as he was saying to me, ‘This is really hard to do,” Andrews said.

After Andrews and Anderson-Kluss lost their jobs at NIC, the IFT and NIC’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors offered legal assistance. The AAUP could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Anderson-Kluss has since been hired as a business instructor for the Coeur d’Alene School District.

NIC’s insurer, ICRMP, provides insurance for public entities throughout Idaho, including Kootenai County. ICRMP has paid out two large settlements on behalf of the county this year, including $70,000 to the administrator of the county’s failed juvenile drug court and $267,000 to a former Kootenai County Sheriff’s captain.