New law shuts back door for teacher misconduct

That slamming sound you hear is the back door once left wide open for school districts to pass problematic teachers from one schoolhouse to the next.

Starting this fall, Iowa schools will have much stricter requirements for reporting allegations of teacher misconduct to state licensers - making it much more difficult for educators and school districts to sidestep allegations of sexual or physical abuse involving students.

Sen. Bob Dvorsky managed to raise the issue from the dead after his teacher misconduct bill, which had passed unanimously in the Senate, suffocated in a House committee last spring.

He found another way forward, attaching the bill's language to an education appropriations bill signed by the governor late last month. “You have to be pretty dogged to get some things done sometimes in Des Moines,” he told me Tuesday. Lucky for Iowa's students and their families, he was.

The law requires districts to place employees on administrative leave while they are being investigated for physical or sexual abuse of a child. If that investigation reveals conduct that could constitute a crime, districts must report the incident to state examiners - even if the educator resigns.

Administrators who fail to make that report risk losing their jobs. That's a significant change from the past.

But will it make our kids safer? Beth Myers, Board of Educational Examiners attorney and investigator, thinks so. Myers has been crafting the rule changes that will help the board comply with the new law.

“It's a step in the right direction,” she told me. “It helps.”

Myers told me she wasn't sure what the change would do to the workload of state investigators. But that's not her main concern: “I would rather have the misconduct reported than be afraid that we're going to be overworked,” she said. That's the spirit of the new law.

But she's just as excited about the law's new ethics training requirement for educators that could help stop problems before they start.

The Board of Educational Examiners will develop that training with help from a national expert in teacher misconduct and prevention to help Iowa educators get a better grasp of professional ethics.

It's a forward-thinking provision that should help take Iowa to the head of the class in handling the thorny issue of teacher misconduct.

And that's exactly where we want to be.

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jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net