Oct 16, 2009

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Charter Schools Outside of the IL Education Labor Board…for Now

In Illinois, as elsewhere, the state’s school districts have their own Labor Relations Acts and Boards.  Illinois teachers’ unions are certified, and their claims of unfair labor practices are heard, by the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board (or IELRB). 

It has been that way for many years, and while the body of decisions by the IELRB grows, it’s you’d think that the jurisdiction of the Board is rarely questioned.  Schools are in, everyone else is out. 

Of course, no issue of labor & employment law is ever really settled.  Even whether schools are within the jurisdiction of the Education Labor Relations Board.

When is a School a School?

A union in Kane County filed with the IELRB to acknowledge majority representation of the teachers of a charter school, and the Board certified the union.  The school took issue, arguing that the IELRB does not have jurisdiction over charter schools because they’re not “educational employers” as defined by the IELRA.  The Board disagreed, and the school appealed.

The school’s argument was that the Charter School Act exempts charter schools from “other [s]tate laws and regulations under the School Code”, and that this exemption included the Education Labor Relation Act.  The union countered that the IELRA was not an education law, but rather a law about how an employer that happened to be a school dealt with its employees.

The Fourth District Appellate Court sided with the school.  The court separated the phrase excluding charter schools from certain state laws into two interesting parts:  “other state laws” and “regulations under the School Code”.  The court pointed to non-education laws that are specifically mentioned in the Charter Schools Act, saying that the legislature clearly did not want to limit the exlusions to education-related laws:

…to conclude that charter schools are not exempt from the Education Labor Act would be to assume the legislature overlooked the Education Labor Act when it drafted the list of specific exceptions. We reject this assumption and conclude that the omission of the Education Labor Act from the list of specified exceptions is not somehow a legislative oversight.

Questions of Intent

The court’s opinion notes that both sides, along with numerous other interested parties, wrote briefs analyzing the legislature’s intent in drafting and passing (or opposing) the Charter School Act, as a way of proving that the schools should or shouldn’t be under the Board’s purview.  The court did a decent job of sidestepping the political issue inherent in that discussion by holding that the statute was plainly written, and refusing to consider what the intent of specific legislators was in drafting it.

A Moot Point?

The court’s opinion ends with a note that a recent legislative change specifically states that charter schools are “educational employers”.  The law isn’t in effect until next year, though, so the court said it couldn’t apply to the case before the court.  Nonetheless, it seems that one major difference between charter schools and typical public schools – the lack of unionized teachers - may be in flux in the coming years. 

At the very least, it looks like next year we won’t be questioning whether schools are under the jurisdiction of the IELRB.