EVANSVILLE — Fired EVSC teacher Chelsea Bailey will stay fired for now, though she could try to appeal her latest defeat during a nearly two-year legal battle with the school corporation.
That might require Bailey, who has contested her firing from Plaza Park Middle School since the September 2024 incident that precipitated it, to have the continued support of the Indiana State Teachers Association. The statewide teachers union has been funding the lawsuit she filed last year against EVSC and its elected school board.
Superior Court Judge Les Shively last week reaffirmed his May 7 ruling granting EVSC’s request for summary judgment — victory — in the case. Shively made his finding after a July 28 hearing during which Bailey’s attorney unsuccessfully argued that EVSC had not followed the law in firing her.
Now — after a nearly three-month appeals process that ended with the school board voting to fire Bailey in December 2024 and a lawsuit rejected two times one year after it was filed — the former teacher must decide whether she will try to carry on fighting. And if so, ISTA may have to decide whether it wants to keep paying for her representation.
ISTA referred questions about Bailey’s case to Mark Lichtenberg, an Evansville-based field representative for the union. Bailey could not be reached for comment.
Bailey’s case was initially approved for legal representation by a committee of ISTA members from across the state. If she wants to take her loss at the trial court level to the Indiana Court of Appeals, Lichtenberg said, the first step is likely a conversation between her and her attorney.
The Courier & Press asked Lichtenberg whether ISTA could decline to pay for any further legal representation for Bailey even if she wanted to press ahead.
“I don’t know the answer,” he replied by email. “If I were to get that question from (Bailey) or any other member in a similar circumstance, I would likely refer her back to legal counsel or ask my manager where to best direct the question.”
What got Bailey fired?
Plaza Park Principal Ernie Griffin reached a preliminary decision to cancel Bailey’s contract days after she allegedly made physical contact with a female student on Sept. 17, 2024.
Then-EVSC Superintendent David Smith would later testify in a closed hearing that, in 21 months (early January 2023 through September 2024) Bailey had racked up “five incidents of discipline that were acted upon by four different building-level administrators, one in the elementary school, one in summer school, and then two administrators in middle school.”
“And all of these, she had agreed to or had admitted that things were factual in the evidence and the disciplinary write-ups, so five disciplinary incidents in 21 months that really showed a very clear pattern of escalating, very poor judgment as well as inappropriate behavior, and that does constitute neglect of duty,” Smith said in an executive session of the school board held Nov. 12, 2024.
Those included incidents in which Bailey vaped in a staff meeting at Dexter Elementary School and called a student a “white boy” while shaking her shoe at him.
In a letter to Bailey informing her of his preliminary decision to cancel her contract, Griffin wrote: “This behavior (the Sept. 17, 2024 incident) occurred despite prior warnings regarding similar interactions with students. You were previously informed that any further incidents of this nature would result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.”
An EVSC written disciplinary action form states that during student dismissal from Plaza Park on Sept. 17, Bailey left her doorway to wade through a crowd of students. She approached a female eighth-grade student, the report says, and led her to the threshold of her classroom doorway “by her backpack strap.”
“The student described to administration that Ms. Bailey had pulled her into the classroom and that she felt like she couldn’t leave,” the report states. “She also stated that Ms. Bailey said, ‘I heard you were talking s*** about me and called me a b****.'”
Bailey later denied that she said, “I heard you were talking s*** about me.”
Bailey had cited the student for a dress code violation that morning, the report states.
The student said she told Bailey she was going to be late to an after-school bus and needed to retrieve her cell phone from the school office.
“The student stated that Ms. Bailey had prevented her leaving by saying, ‘No, we’re going to talk about this,'” the report states. “The student said she was already upset that Ms. Bailey had pulled her by her backpack strap, which she said triggered her due to previous trauma. Student admits to stating to Ms. Bailey that she was ‘being a b****.'”
The disciplinary action form states that Bailey said several students had told her that the female student had called her a b****. She acknowledged she asked another teacher to pull up the student on PowerSchool, a cloud-based learning management system for K-12 schools and districts, so she could see what she looks like.
Bailey said when she saw the student walking out to a bus with peers, she “hooked a finger” on the girl’s backpack strap and “led” the student through a crowd of students to her doorway.
Bailey confirmed that the student said she needed to retrieve her cell phone and didn’t want to be late to the bus. Bailey acknowledged saying, “No, we’re going to talk about this,” the disciplinary form states. She admitted she asked the girl why she had called her a b****.
Before an after-school meeting with school administrators the next day, the report says, Bailey directed at least two eighth-grade students to submit emails to her outlining what they heard the female student say about her the previous day. Emails from two students were sent to Bailey, and Bailey presented them at the meeting, the report states.
Testifying during the Nov. 12, 2024 closed session of the EVSC school board, Bailey said she “thought I did everything by protocol.”
“And after school, I told (the female student) just to come here real quick, and we did a quick reteach, redirection, that you can’t call a teacher a b**** just because you got dress-coded,” Bailey said.
Bailey denied that she corralled the student in her classroom.
EVSC attorney Jim Johnson confronted Bailey over her assertion that she told the female student to “come here.”
“But that’s not actually what happened, is it?” Johnson said.
Bailey replied that she “honestly don’t even remember if I grabbed her by the backpack.”
Bailey’s lawyer hints that EVSC broke the law
During two closed door sessions with the school board — the first on Nov. 12 and the second on Dec. 20, 2024 — Bailey’s ISTA-funded lawyer, Indianapolis-based Eric Hylton, rarely missed a chance to make a point in her favor.
Hylton pointed out that students wouldn’t have been present for the staff meeting at which Bailey was observed vaping. He said Bailey hadn’t been accused before of pulling on a student’s backpack and asserted that, “putting yourhands on a student’s backpack is not putting their hand on the student.”
Hylton reminded an EVSC official that the female student who Bailey allegedly pulled by her backpack strap had admitted to calling Bailey a b****. He asked, “Is that OK?” and asked several times whether the student had been disciplined.
During the July 28 hearing before Judge Shively, Hylton argued that the school board’s second closed session — the one held Dec. 20, 2024 — and an extension of time the board took from November to December 2024 to render its final decision to terminate Bailey were not allowed by law.
After the Nov. 12 closed session, the school board’s agenda states, “It was moved to continue the matter until the next regularly scheduled Board meeting at which time the Board will take action with a public vote on the matter.”
But the next regularly scheduled meeting was on Nov. 25, and on that date the board “determined it was not prepared to render a decision at this time and expressed the need to continue the proceedings in order to gather additional testimony,” according to the agenda.
EVSC’s attorney would later note in a brief that Smith had testified on Nov. 12 that Plaza Park Assistant Principal Kiara Butler and Ryan Merriwether, the school corporation’s chief administrative officer, had agreed with the decision to terminate Bailey.
Members of the school board asked to hear testimony from Butler and Merriwether, EVSC argued, and that’s why the school board opted to hold another executive session on Dec. 20.
Days after the Nov. 25 meeting, in an email to EVSC’s attorney, Hylton had argued that the school board didn’t have the right under law to request that additional witnesses be presented. The Nov. 12 executive session had already formally closed the record, he wrote.
In the hearing before Shively last month, Hylton raised the possibility that EVSC’s school board may have violated the law governing public meetings.
“We have to find out what happened between Nov. 12 and (Nov. 25),” Hylton told Shively. “Were they having meetings outside of public board meeting? Were they having improper phone calls? What were they doing?
“There had to be some discussions in there. And boards can only meet in public session.”
Bailey had the right under procedural due process to get answers to those questions, Hylton declared, and that would mean a new discovery process.
Shively had questions of his own.
“Let’s say I deny summary judgement to both parties,” the judge said. “So how do we proceed then? Do we have a full-blown trial?”
“We go out and do discovery,” Hylton replied.
“Discovery of what?” Shively retorted.
“We discover, were there sessions?” Hylton said. “Were there conversations among board members? Did they go and have improper meetings off the record, which could bring new legal claims? Something happened between Nov. 12 and Nov. 25, when they said they were simply going to vote.”
EVSC: The facts supported Bailey’s firing
EVSC attorney Johnson argued that there’s nothing in the state statute governing cancellation of teacher contracts that says an executive session of the school board can’t be continued for good cause.
“The legislature recognized, ‘This is a process. We want you to get it right,'” Johnson said.
But Hylton zeroed in on procedure.
“The public (school board) conference, we can agree, is different from the private conference,” Bailey’s lawyer said. “So even if (Johnson) argues, they have a right to extend the private conference, they never extended the private conference at the first meeting (on Nov. 12). They extended the public conference. And then when they had the next public conference (on Nov. 25), they said we’re going to extend the private conference.”
EVSC attorney Johnson countered that Hylton was arguing procedure and ignoring the question of whether Bailey actually should have been fired.
“They don’t challenge the substantive, that there were facts to support the cancellation,” Johnson said. “They just want to go down this road of, ‘Let’s have these procedural (issues)’ — but they never show the substantive errors (in Shively’s original ruling) because there can’t be a substantive error because the substance of the termination, they concede.”
Bailey’s attorney did not address that, instead reiterating his claim that EVSC had failed to follow the law.
“(Johnson) just wants to ignore — he says well, the private conference can be extended,” Hylton told Shively. “But they concluded the evidence, they closed the case (on Nov. 12) and made no motion at the private conference or at the public board meeting (on Nov. 12) to continue the private conference. They simply continued the vote.”
In his ruling issued last week, Shively found that EVSC’s school board had not violated Bailey’s rights.
“(Bailey) asserts that the board was required to take action at the first public hearing following the private conference with the governing board,” the judge wrote. “(State law) states that the governing body “may cancel a contract with a teacher’ at the next public meeting following the private conference. This provision is therefore not mandatory.”
Shively addressed the school board’s actions.
“The additional private conference and the extension of time to render the final decision has not resulted in denial of any substantive rights of the Plaintiff (Bailey),” he wrote. “The record clearly supports the grounds for termination.”
The next move is up to Bailey and ISTA, the statewide teachers union.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Fired EVSC teacher’s case takes a turn
Reporting by Thomas B. Langhorne, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
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By Thomas B. Langhorne, Evansville Courier & Press | USA TODAY Network
