Douglas seeks appeals court ruling over firing employees

PHOENIX — The attorney for state schools chief Diane Douglas is asking the Court of Appeals to do something a trial judge would not: rule that she controls the employees of the state Board of Education.

In legal brief filed this week, Steve Tully told the appellate judges that it is clear that Arizona statutes require all employees of the board to report to her. He said that means working under her direction — and in her offices.

Tully also contends that extends to the right to fire the employees that state law gives the board the power to hire. He does not dispute that state law empowers the board, on which Douglas also serves as a member, to set the education policies of the state. But Tully said, in essence, the board can’t do anything about all that by itself.

“The board has no power to execute its own policies,” he wrote. “That power is delegated by law to the superintendent.”

Tully has to take his case to the appeals court because Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Patricia Starr decided earlier this year she could not issue a ruling. Starr said the dispute between the board and the superintendent of public instruction was “a political question not appropriate for judicial resolution.”

That left things as they are, with the board’s employees moved out of the Department of Education building. Since then the board voted, over Douglas’ objections, to hire a new executive director.

Tully wants the appellate judges to reverse all that.

He said Douglas is not challenging the decision by the board to lease space for its employees in another building, calling that “incidental” to the ongoing dispute.

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What is at issue, he said, is who gets to “direct the work and working conditions of the board’s employees.” Where the move becomes an issue, Tully said, is it impairs Douglas’ ability to direct the work of the employees, direction that he said is hers — and hers alone — to give. And he told the appellate judges there is no reason they can’t decide what the law says about who controls the board’s staff.

Much of the dispute involves that question of who can hire and fire employees.

It started nearly two months after Douglas took office in January when she attempted to fire Christine Thompson, who was at the time the board’s executive director, and Sabrina Vazquez, Thompson’s assistant.

Douglas, elected on a platform of repealing the Common Core academic standards that the board had enacted, called the pair “two liberal staff who have publicly stated they will block all efforts to repeal or change Common Core.”

Gov. Doug Ducey, who appoints all board members except Douglas, interceded to direct state personnel officials to ignore her order.

Future disputes between the board’s staff and Douglas’ employees eventually led the board to vote to move out of the Department of Education building.

No date has been set for the appellate court to consider the matter.