Arizona Teacher Discipline Guidelines | Disciplinary Guidelines
What do the discipline guidelines with the Arizona State Board of Education include?
Suppose a teacher undergoes disciplinary action against their license. In that case, there are categorized guidelines from the board for what discipline.
Immoral, unprofessional conduct is comprehensive, so they break it down. It might be breaking your teaching contract with your school and criminal offenses outside school. It could be DUI or assault, or things like that. Then, it goes even further if you’re impaired while at school, which might be under the influence of alcohol or drugs. It breaks those all down into those general disciplinary categories for teachers.
It will also discuss if you come to a settlement agreement, so you agree on finding facts and conclusions of the law.
If you contest the discipline or the accusations against you, you’ll go before the Professional Practices Advisory Committee. They would make a finding of facts and conclusions of law. You would put on evidence. If you would like, you can also examine witnesses, and legal counsel can represent you—this kind of breaks it all down. Then within those categories, it’s going to list what the presumed discipline is.
Links of Interest:
State Board of Education Four Basic Types of Discipline
The state board of education has four basic types of discipline. Those are:
- Letter of censure
- Suspension
- Suspension with conditions, or
- Revocation.
Now, those are the four categories of discipline. However, the board or the Professional Practices Advisory Committee will consider aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
Aggravating circumstances may be going to count against you. Have you been disciplined in the past? Was it for a similar offense? Things like that. Those are going to be aggravated circumstances. They’ll count charges against you.
Mitigating circumstances are going to help you. So, have you ever had any prior discipline? If you haven’t, that could be a mitigating circumstance. What were the events around the allegations? If you broke your contracts, why did you do that?
Was there a good reason? Are you leaving the teaching profession or getting hired for a better position? The list goes on and is very vague, but you can use your facts to your advantage to try to help mitigate that discipline.
Again, these are presumptive guidelines, which means they’re guidelines. So, you will hopefully use all the circumstances and facts to help your case.
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