Teachers sue UM System for breach of contract
Forty-five teachers were fired from MoVIP in 2009.
Published Sept. 3, 2010
After losing their jobs as a result of the state's budget cuts, a group of 14 Missouri schoolteachers have filed a $900,000 lawsuit against the University of Missouri System, among others.
Columbia resident Barbara Peck was one of 14 teachers who filed the lawsuit last month in Boone County. It names as defendants the UM System, the state of Missouri, the State Board of Education and a nonprofit venture of the university that had previously hired her and the other teachers.
The teachers were employed by the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP), which offered online courses to Missouri elementary and high school students.
MoVIP Virtual Education Director Curt Fuchs said the state's budget cuts changed the focus of the program, making it tuition-based.
"Basically when the state budget crisis hit, they made reductions, and one of the reductions was the MoVIP program," Fuchs said. "In the past, everything was paid through the state funds and when we lost our state funding, we basically have gone now to a tuition model."
Fuchs said the students' classes through MoVIP must be funded by either the school districts or students themselves, rather than through the state as it had been in the past.
"Just like the higher education where they're starting to see budget cuts, we're in the same boat," Fuchs said. "The only change is who pays for the classes. We curtailed the state-funded program and switched to the tuition program."
A total of 45 teachers, three of whom reside in Columbia, were fired from MoVIP just three months into their one-year contract. They are suing for a breach of contract.
Columbia attorney David Brown will be representing the teachers in court.
"Barbara Peck called me, and she was upset about the situation," Brown said. "She told me that she knew other teachers who were mad about it too, and I told her to have them call me. Next thing you know, I have 14 teachers who wanted to have their contracts enforced."
Brown said the teachers are suing for two reasons.
"The first is that they had one-year contracts to be paid a salary for the entire school year, and they wanted to be paid under the contract they agreed upon," he said. "The second thing they're suing for is almost all of them left existing teaching positions to work for the program. The reason they did this is because they believed the program had at least a year's worth of funding."
What the teachers did not know, Brown said, is even before the program began hiring the teachers, there were plans to cut it. He said if the teachers had been aware of the possible outcome, none of them would have left their original jobs. They are looking to find out who would have known that information, claiming he or she misrepresented the job.
An art teacher at North Callaway High School prior to MoVIP, Peck was one of the teachers who left a tenured position to pursue the MoVIP position.
"The salary was a little bit more, and it offered a lot more flexibility and opportunities for me to do something different," Peck said.
Peck has since found two part-time jobs, but no full time positions with benefits. She has been working toward completing her doctorate and teaching online for the University of Central Missouri. She is also teaching for Columbia College in Jefferson City. Although she was able to obtain another position after MoVIP, many of the other teachers did not.
"We believe that the teachers all had one-year contracts, and at a minimum they should at least be paid out their salary for the full year," Brown said. "I think there's a good chance that the ones who are unable to get a teaching job the next year will get money to compensate them for having left their jobs based on misrepresentation."
The UM System's involvement in the case stems from its program Enhancing Missouri's Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies (eMINTS), which was responsible for hiring MoVIP's new teachers. For the 2009-2010 school year, eMINTS hired 45 teachers. All were fired in October 2009.
Brown predicted the lawsuit could cost the state and eMINTS about $900,000 combined.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which runs MoVIP, and the UM System declined to comment on specifics of the case because of pending litigation.
