Tips and Tricks: Employee Discipline Investigations
Posted by Brian Crowley on November 15, 2012
For those who follow me on Twitter and who follow this blog, you may have noticed a bit less content in the past two weeks than usual. I was busy assisting my colleague Shelli Anderson with a tenured teacher dismissal hearing and so was not as focused on Tweeting and blogging as I would usually be. Since I’ve been back, I have come across some interesting stories about teacher misconduct, including a teacher accused of locking students in a closet in Arizona, and a teacher who allegedly made the following comment on Twitter after Barack Obama’s presidential win:
Congrats Obama. As one of my students sang down the hallway, ‘We get to keep our fooood stamps’…which I pay for because they can’t budget their money…and really, neither can you.”
What better time than now to review a few tips and tricks for employee discipline investigations? As most school leaders know too well, the first step when you get an allegation of misconduct like those cited above is to conduct an investigation to determine if discipline is warranted. One of the first things you do in that process, moreover, is to conduct interviews of employees, including the employee about whom the allegation is made. Here are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind when completing this important step in the investigatory process.
Admonitions and Representation
The purpose of these initial meetings is fact gathering, so it is important to make that point clear to the subject of the interview. Always begin an interview by telling the employee that you are there to gather all the facts you can so that they understand the purposes of the interview. If an employee is hesitant to participate, moreover, you can remind them that this is the chance to tell his/her side of the story and to ensure the administration has the whole story when making decisions about the situation. And of course, always make sure the employee knows before the meeting about any rights to union representation and that the employee may have and make sure that any necessary representative is present during the interview. (more…)