ICCSD Retaliates Again by Firing Employee

Captions: 1. Stephanie Van Housen, former homeless liaison for the Iowa City Community School District. 2. Chris Lynch, ICCSD board president, greeting ICCSD attorney, Joe Holland prior to Stephanie's hearing. 3. On left, Anita Hemingway; on right, Phil Hemingway, board member and owner/manager of Phil's Repair. 4. Chris Liebig, board member and University of Iowa law professor.

Iowa City, Iowa. Parents, children, and concerned citizens turned out at a hearing on Tuesday evening, September 6, 2016, to show support for reinstating Stephanie Van Housen, a fired school employee, who had worked as a district liaison to homeless and low-income children, who they believe was the target of retaliation for her strong advocacy on behalf of the children she served.

Van Housen was placed on leave and subsequently fired after receiving a disciplinary notice that cited her discussions with city, state, and school board officials as key factors in her discipline. Parents, children, and community groups such as the Center for Worker Justice have spoken out against the district’s decision, arguing that Stephanie has been a skilled and experienced homeless liaison with no history of formal discipline who was a strong, unapologetic advocate for the resources low-income children need to succeed.

The groups further emphasized that Van Housen’s termination sends the wrong message in light of an Iowa Department of Education report finding allegations of a “retaliatory” culture. The report described Superintendent Steve Murley as having been ignorant of the fact that Grant Wood Area Education Agency was in fact the supervisory arm of special education at the school district and Murley was not at liberty to ignore GWAEA’s recommendations for avoiding special education violations. Murley’s failure to take GWAEA seriously caused the recommendations to be bumped to a higher level, the state Department of Education.

The Iowa Dept. of Education finance team also determined that expenditures coded as special education should be appropriate and that changes in procedures are necessary to ensure all contracts and agreements are signed by the board president, namely, Chris Lynch at present and in the past few years, as required by Iowa Code. Chris Lynch apparently failed to ensure that he signed all contracts and agreements coded as special education.

Now there’s very little that Murley and Lynch can do about the Iowa Department of Education blowing the whistle on their special education violations, but they can fire Stephanie Van Housen, the homeless liaison for the school district, for blowing the whistle on the inappropriate use of boxes that district district popped behavior-disordered kids in special education. Those boxes are only supposed to be used when a student is a danger to himself or others, not as a routine disciplinary tactic.

I thought these students were put in rooms! They’re not rooms. They’re boxes. If I was a behavior-disordered kid, many of them homeless, I’d go as crazy as the chipmunks go in the box trap we set for them when our cat brings them inside. We do that so they’ll live, but they forget all about the peanut butter and crackers they long for with their little arms stretched through the openings of the cage once they’re all the way inside and can’t get out till we let them outside in the tall grass of our prairie patch.

Van Housen is in a long line of distinguished whistleblowers fired by the school district for blowing the whistle on inappropriate and illegal activities. There are others, decent people with integrity, who have been fired by scoundrels, higher in rank and short on integrity.

“It’s hard for parents to trust the district when paraprofessionals and teachers are facing retaliation if they speak up about something they think is not right in the schools,” said Rafael Morataya, executive director for the Center for Worker Justice. The school district has written policies affirming the right of employees to “express an ethical dissent without consequence” (Superintendent Direction 3b2) and to “communicate with Board members, either individually or as a Board, with regard to any matter” (Superintendent Direction 3b3). Van Housen and her supporters argue that her disciplinary notice represents a clear violation of these policies.

Board member Chris Liebig, a University of Iowa law professor, cited a First Amendment case a teacher won after he criticized administration and was fired for his trouble and expressed doubt that the district should open itself up to possible litigation, which would be expensive, instead of settling with Ms. Van Housen. Phil Hemingway made a motion to pay Van Housen back pay and reinstate her. Phil, Chris Liebig, and Lori Roetlin voted for the motion. Chris Lynch, board president, who did his best to stifle the board from speaking, asking follow-up questions and the audience from clapping for Ms. Van Housen and her attorney, voted against the motion; as did Paul Roesler (would that J.P. Claussen had been elected instead of Roesler), the administration’s new lapdog; Latasha de Loach; and of course, Brian Kirschling.

This is not over, of course. Stephanie Van Housen has recourse to litigation of the sort that Chris Liebig wisely warned the board about.

For my own part, I had a brief experience working with Joan Vandenberg, who orally did her best to criticize Van Housen’s work performance. Nate Willems, Stephanie’s attorney, pointed out that none of those oral criticisms were in the 81 pages of district documentation of Stephanie’s performance. In any case, I had a client student in the district I advocated for years ago. He required PALS program transportation and met the qualifications for such transportation. Joan Vandenberg was in charge of that program as she said in the hearing. She acted like the program’s money was her own personal account and refused to meet the needs of my client, even though he clearly qualified for the transportation. It was a brief experience, but in my opinion, revelatory of Ms. Vandenberg’s character.

Also, as Chris Liebig pointed out in the hearing and as Stephanie Van Housen told me personally, the 81-page document is really an 83-page document and the district refused to release all 83 pages. Why? What are they trying to hide?

My next blog post: Suspected immigrant students as young as five years old are being removed from kindergarten classrooms and other elementary level classrooms and asked what their immigration status is without parental consent and without advocates for the child in the Iowa City Community School District. One Latino five-year-old asked his father once he was home, "Daddy, are you going to vote for Hillary Clinton?"