2nd Duval School Board meeting on teacher misconduct postponed by 'pending legal matters'
A second Duval County School Board meeting about handling of teacher misconduct complaints was “postponed due to pending legal matters,” a spokesman reported shortly before the meeting was scheduled to start Friday.
The delay was requested by lawyers from Jacksonville’s Office of General Counsel, said a statement on behalf of board Chairwoman Kelly Coker, who said information about rescheduling would come after she talked with the attorneys.
The meeting, which had been set for 2 p.m., was designed to follow onto talks held Wednesday that touched on longstanding complaints involving faculty at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and a separate letter from state Education Commissioner Manny Diaz that about 50 teacher complaints since 2020 had wrongly gone unreported to the state until last week.
The two meetings were seen by some supporters of Superintendent Diana Greene as steps toward removing from office the first Black woman to lead the school district responsible for 129,000 students.
The NAACP’s Jacksonville branch had argued Friday morning that talk of removing Greene from office would be “outrageous and politically motivated.”
Attorneys talked to the board Wednesday about having a South Florida law firm examine the teacher complaints’ handling, and the NAACP argued the board should “allow the outside investigation to proceed without interference.”
It’s not clear what pending matters affected the meeting.
CBS-47/FOX-30 newsroom Action News Jax reported anonymous claims Wednesday that Greene was negotiating terms to leave before her contract ends in 2025, but that hasn’t been confirmed.
Separately, the school district had reported that the supervisor of its professional standards office, Reginald Johnson, had been reassigned from his job pending a professional standards investigation that presumably involved Diaz’s complaints about cases not being reported to the state.
Greene said in written remarks earlier this week that an audit report from January had checked district procedures for reporting employees’ ethical conduct and didn’t mention any undelivered files.
Diaz's warning about unreported cases followed a series of actions to remove Douglas Anderson teachers from classrooms. Music teacher Jeffrey Clayton was arrested last month on charges involving lewd conduct with a student, while the school district has since stated that other teachers not charged with any crime had been reassigned pending professional reviews.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 'Pending legal maters' stall Duval School Board teacher-conduct meeting
