The Akron Board of Education Thursday voted to rescind a contract with a private tutoring company, with Superintendent Michael Robinson saying legal action taken by the teachers’ union made it impossible for the program to proceed.
School board members voted 5-0 to rescind their approval for Varsity Tutors to offer 2,400 tutoring sessions for students, especially fourth graders who didn’t receive promotion scores in third grade reading tests. The online tutors would have been funded with $156,000 in state money.
But the Akron Education Association filed a grievance, a lawsuit and an unfair labor practice complaint, saying that the board illegally approved the contract and that it was a violation of the union’s collective bargaining agreement. In recommending the school board not move forward with the program, Robinson said it was because of the AEA’s actions.
Tutoring seats, and the money, will go to another school district
“Varsity Tutors has advised us, if the project cannot move forward by Feb. 1, the Ohio Department of Education will be requesting that Varsity Tutors reallocate the tutoring seats to another school district, instead of APS,” Robinson said, reading from a prepared statement. “Thus, since the legal actions taken by AEA are currently preventing us from moving forward with the Varsity Tutors program by this Feb. 1 deadline, I have reluctantly decided to recommend that the board rescind the resolution.”
Robinson added that he hoped the decision not to move forward with the outside tutors would allow the district to “move past the disputes that have arisen over this program and refocus all our time and energy to advancing the needs of our scholars.”
Varsity Tutors declined to comment on the contract rescission.
Union will still pursue legal action against district
Pat Shipe, the AEA president, said she planned to continue the legal processes to improve transparency and honesty in the district. She said the AEA met with district representatives about the grievance Jan. 30 and no agreement was reached. The district has 10 business days from that meeting to respond.
Shipe said Robinson didn’t want to engage or collaborate with the union and had canceled meetings with her through the rest of the year. A spokesperson for the district, Mark Williamson, said previously that Shipe would be meeting with a labor relations director instead.
Shipe called Robinson’s statement unbelievable, saying it would have been a travesty to bring private tutors into classrooms.
“I think it’s sad, but not for the reasons he thinks,” she said.
AEA president says there’s no shortage of tutors
Shipe added that existing teachers could do the tutoring work Varsity Tutors would have done, working an extended school day or finding time during the day.
“The superintendent has inferred that we’re short on tutors and therefore we don’t have enough educators. That’s simply not true,” she said. “Those are the discussions we should be having.”
Gregory Harrison, a pastor at Antioch Baptist Church on Vernon Odom Boulevard who spoke during a public comment period and who often speaks at board meetings, asked that school board members not let themselves be bullied by the union. While the AEA is there to protect teachers, he said, the board is there to make sure students are educated.
“We need to take a stand at some point,” he said. “If you really care about students, then help them read.”
District still intends to deal with pandemic learning loss
Robinson said he was going to “continue to support the students as best we can” but there were no plans to add more focused tutoring on top of what the district is already doing.
Diana Autry, the school board president, said there would be other opportunities to help students. She said the fact that the AEA — which won raises in the last contract negotiation — would suggest the board was trying to outsource jobs was “inaccurate and unfortunate.”
Board members originally voted to approve the contract Jan. 8, after an executive session. Robinson recommended Jan. 22 that they rescind that vote after pushback from the AEA, though the matter failed in a 5-2 vote. Board members agreed then that they would come back and reconsider before the Feb. 1 deadline to complete the contract.
Williamson, the district spokesperson, said board members signed the contract, but Varsity Tutors never did.
Autry said the board was still interested in dealing with learning loss because of the pandemic, but Varsity Tutors would not be how it did so.
“Unfortunately, it’s kind of a moot point because, simply stated, the company doesn’t have to deal with our mess,” Autry said.
Rene Molenaur, a member of the school board, voted against the tutoring program each of the three times it came before the board. Thursday, she said she knew from her own experience having a child learning to read while going to school online during the pandemic that online instruction wasn’t as valuable as in-person teaching was.
Instructional decisions for students are very important, she said.
“I know sometimes, something isn’t better than nothing,” she said. “Sometimes a negative experience can be worse than no experience at all.”
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