JEFFERSON CITY — The state board of education on Tuesday suspended the license of a Hazelwood preschool teacher who broke her contract when she resigned last year.
Asueleni Deloney’s Missouri teaching certificate will be suspended for one year, the board voted at its monthly meeting.
Deloney resigned from Jana Elementary in Florissant on Aug. 30 after signing a contract the previous April for the 2022-23 school year. Hazelwood School District did not release her from the contract because they were unable to hire a replacement, according to state records.
At a state hearing in March, Deloney said she resigned because she was struggling financially after eight years as a teacher in the Hazelwood district. A union representative warned her that “it could get nasty because they need teachers in the classroom,” Deloney said during the hearing.
The hearing transcript indicates that Deloney may have taken a teaching job in Illinois, where she was issued a license in May 2022 for early childhood education.
The report on Deloney’s case does not mention questions about radioactive contamination at Jana Elementary first raised by parents in summer 2022. The school sits in the floodplain of Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated starting in the 1940s with residue from atomic weapons production.
An independent report found radioactive contamination in dust and dirt samples taken Aug. 15 from inside and outside the school.
The Hazelwood School Board shuttered the school in October, sending students and staff to several other elementary schools. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged with cleanup of the creek, and a St. Charles company have since said that Jana is radiologically safe.
School districts have increasingly sought to discipline teachers that break contracts as staffing shortages have grown worse since the pandemic. A 2016 Missouri law allows the state board to discipline teachers that annul their contracts.
A record high of 11 teachers faced disciplinary actions related to work contracts in the 2022-2023 school year, according to the Springfield News-Leader. In most of the cases, school boards rejected the resignations of teachers while they were under contract.
The state board of education voted Tuesday on three of the cases. The board suspended the license of Jordan York for one year after the English teacher quit the Independence School District last August for “family matters” and did not pay a fine for breaking the contract, according to state records.
The board voted against disciplining a Spanish teacher who resigned from the Hancock Place School District in south St. Louis County after signing an annual contract.
Veronica Delgado resigned in September after being threatened by students several times and experiencing severe anxiety. The Hancock Place board rejected the resignation and referred the matter to the state board. The position was never filled in Hancock Place, and some classes were taught virtually after Delgado’s resignation.
Seeking discipline for teachers who break their contracts is counterproductive and heavy-handed, Mark Jones of the Missouri National Education Association told the News-Leader.
“This does not incentivize (teachers) to try and find a new school or situation that is a better fit for them when they can basically lose their livelihood because months after signing a contract they realize maybe they need to make a different decision or work in a different setting,” Jones told the newspaper. “This is creating a very strange system … and something that works against everything that we state our values are, which is trying to keep people in the profession and respect them as educators.”
The state teacher shortage came up several times during Tuesday’s board meeting.
Nearly 20% of the teaching and administrator positions in Riverview Gardens are vacant, Superintendent Joylynn Pruitt-Adams told the board during an update on the provisionally accredited district.
In 2022-2023, Lewis and Clark Elementary had no certified teachers, with substitutes covering all the core subjects. Riverview Gardens High School had one certified math teacher, Pruitt-Adams said.
School librarians across Missouri are pulling books from shelves as they face the potential for criminal charges under a new state law that was passed at the end of August 2022.
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