"Other Duties as Assigned"
This piece was made possible by the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning (CEWL).
For at least the final five years of my teaching career, I was very concerned about the preponderance of “other duties” districts placed on teachers and other school staff. (I was invested enough in the issue that I named this newsletter after the concept of “other duties as assigned”.)
Some “other duties” seem reasonable. If you’re a classroom teacher, it seems reasonable to expect that you might attend at least one parent-teacher night per semester, that you might attend professional development, that you might make time to give feedback on student projects.
Others are less reasonable. When a Cherokee Schools teacher sued her district in 2019 for requiring her to work at the concession stand and to make gift baskets for fundraisers, she had a point. After all, the district hired her to teach students, not to make gift baskets or sell snacks.
Unfortunately, the law in this area is somewhat unclear. When I spoke to a labor attorney Grant LeFever few years ago, she told me, “if the ‘other duties’ assigned were so numerous and of such a nature that the employee’s “primary duty” no longer could be considered “teaching, tutoring, instructing or lecturing in the activity of imparting knowledge,” then that employee may not qualify for the FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act] teacher exemption and thus be entitled to a minimum hourly wage and overtime pay.
“Beyond these two potential FLSA arguments, I am not aware of any established or reasonable expectations that limit the kinds of duties districts could assign.”
This is not legal advice, but I take it to mean that some excessive “other duties” are possibly unlawful, while others are not. But unlawful or not, many educators and educational experts argue that even if districts can legally get away with piling more and more work on the people who work in schools, there always comes a time to pay the piper when more and more people quit working in schools, and fewer and fewer replacements can be found.
So why do schools do this?
Some “other duties” are a product of states underfunding of schools.
South Carolina has historically underfunded schools even according to the modest legal requirements laid out in the state’s own Education Finance Act of 1977. The law requires the General Assembly to write a budget each year which fully funds the “base student cost” for all public school students, an amount calculated to meet “the funding level necessary for providing a minimum foundation program which includes the funding level necessary for supporting the defined minimum program and to meet, as funds are available, needs identified by each district board of trustees’ annual report, which reflects the needs identified in the annual school reports of the district and other assessments.”
According to data from the SC Office of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs, “base student cost” has not been fully funded since 2007, and has been fully funded in only eight of the thirty-three years since 1989, the earliest year for which RFA provided data.
A few years ago, the state changed the funding formula to be more “flexible” in terms of defining how state aid to classrooms could be spent, but that didn’t change the fact that many districts did not have enough revenue to fully staff schools, to keep class sizes low, or to keep teachers and other employees from having to take on additional work
And while they sometimes act out of necessity, many school districts have also gotten too comfortable asking teachers and other employees to do things they shouldn’t be asking them to do. A former superintendent in Richland County once told me that he felt a then-new law requiring that teachers have a minimum of 30 minutes of unencumbered time (something I had, as a matter of policy, even when I was a cashier at BiLo during college), would upset what he called a fragile “house of cards” whose foundation was the work teachers regularly did outside of their normal duties.
These additional duties take their toll on teachers, and contribute to burnout and low morale.
As I’ve argued in the past, teacher exhaustion and burnout are not only bad for individual teachers and their students, but they drive attrition and scare potential new teachers away from entering the profession.
Perhaps that’s why Representative Neal Collins and three cosponsors in the SC House introduced H. 3210 last year. That bill, which was ultimately referred to the House Education and Public Works committee, would require that “A teacher may not be required to perform extracurricular duties, regardless of compensation, as an express or implied condition for employment.”
That bill, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t get a lot of attention in the South Carolina General Assembly last session.
Many legislators were far more concerned with passing an unconstitutional school voucher bill, arguing about “DEI,” and promoting other politicized talking points about schools in lieu of solving the real problems facing students, families, and teachers. (I helped ProTruth South Carolina to compile lists of pre-filed legislation to watch for during the last session and for the current session, which give a pretty clear picture of the priorities of the legislature. As the current session gets going, legislative priorities include prohibiting transgender and nonbinary students from using the restrooms of their choice and refining the language of the aforementioned unconstitutional voucher law.)
School employees have been warning us about “other duties as assigned” for years.
Read this piece in full for free by visiting the CEWL website.
