As some may know the Student Congress debate season is near, and with this comes a docket of bills of legislation that are presented to the forensics and debate team. The first bill of this document presents a potential fix to a problem that may be occurring in our schools today.

Bill #1 of the ACTAA Fall 2024 Legislative Docket is a bill recommending to the Arkansas General Assembly to revise and reinstate the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act introduced by Russellville High School. This bill reinstates the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, which required a time of meeting, which allowed teachers to go through a process before being fired.

The Teacher Fair Dismissal Act was originally removed under the passage of the LEARNS Act, which opens up to a wide possibility of teachers being fired without a justifiable cause. But the question is, is this bill to bring back the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act back, worth it? 

To find out how teachers may feel about this bill we asked Speech and Debate/creative writing teacher, Jennifer Alaquinez, whether she would be in affirmation (in support) or negation (against) this bill. “Affirmation for my own sake,” Alaquinez responded.

We must look through all the details of the bill before we create our own opinion. In section 2 of the bill, it states that the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act will be given to a committee made up of members of the Arkansas Department of Education, who will review and revise the legislation in order to appropriate it for modern schools in order to correct the issues that led to its removal in the first place.

Section 3 states, a non-renewal, termination, suspension, or other disciplinary action by a school district shall be void unless the school district substantially complies with all provisions of the modified act and the school district’s applicable personnel policies.

Finally, in section 4 it states that the revised version of the act will be enforced by the Arkansas Department of Education. Section 4 then goes on to state that all laws in conflict are hereby null and void and it is administered by the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year.

Now that we know what the bill is actually for and what it does, we can now look into the arguments in both affirmation, in support of the bill, and negation, against the bill.

Even though Alaquinez said she would be in affirmation, she also went on to explain why it may not fully work. “[The Teacher Fair Dismissal Act] has good meaning but it’s old, and everything old needs to be reassessed or amended,” Alaquinez added.

Luckily this bill does mention in section 2 that the Arkansas Department of Education would review and revise the legislation in order to appropriate for modern schools to correct the issues that led to the removal to begin with. Alaquinez also talked briefly over reasons that could show why we need to reimplement the bill. These reasons abeing that taking the Teachers Fair Dismissal Act away increased the fear of speaking out for teachers. Taking away the act can give power to decisions made on emotion and not fact. When the Fair Dismissal Act was in place, every person had a voice. 

Now to transition into reasoning against this bill, we will go over some of the flaws in the bill. The first argument against the bill would be that the Teachers Fair Dismissal Act made it very hard to remove teachers that are actually bringing harm to classrooms. According to  the Arkansas Times, “critics of the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act complained that the law made it much too difficult to fire ‘bad teachers.'”

A second argument is that in every piece of legislation there is a piece that says anything in conflict is now null and void. This means that it is wiped out completely. If this bill goes into place, then the LEARNS Act would be wiped out because of it. You may be asking “Why is that bad?”. Well, this is bad because according to Arkansas Advocate the LEARNS Act raised the minimum salary for teachers and it provides up to 90% funding for schools. If we get rid of the LEARNS Act, then we will also be getting rid of a lot of funding for schools.

After going over all the information and arguments for both sides, what is your opinion? Participate in our poll and consider to leave a comment.