Duval School Board OKs employee ethics policies aimed at keeping kids safer

The Duval County School Board unanimously and with little discussion Tuesday approved new employee ethics and professional standards policies.

Tuesday’s vote proved timely, just days after yet another teacher was removed from his classroom at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts because of allegations of misconduct involving a student — the sixth teacher to be reassigned or fired from the school under investigation in the last couple school years.

And it came days after the district rolled out a new education campaign called “Know the Line” meant to help employees, parents and students better understand what kind of teacher-student interactions are appropriate. Superintendent Christopher Bernier said the campaign was “well underway” by the time he joined the district in July.

“This became something easy to support,” Bernier said during Tuesday’s meeting.

The rewritten policies govern the district’s response to situations regarding staff behavior and student safety. They require Duval Schools personnel to immediately report misconduct that “affects the health, safety or welfare of a student” — whether at school or off duty.

DCPS has faced increasingly intense criticism over the last couple of years for its mishandling of student incident reports and its perceived slowness to respond to teacher misconduct at Douglas Anderson – most infamously in the case of ex-vocal department chair Jeffrey Clayton, who just began serving a 10-year prison sentence .

Know the Line

Shortly before her departure this summer, interim Superintendent Dana Kriznar released a new plan for safeguarding students and responding quickly to allegations of misconduct by teachers and staff. Her plan became the Know the Line campaign.

The policy changes the board moved to solidify Tuesday reinforce that plan.

“I appreciate the effort to not just say that we’re putting student safety first but actually following through with that,” board member Lori Hershey said.

State Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. has been one of the more vocal critics of the district. The updated policies address concerns he expressed in a letter to Kriznar in May.

They call for employees to be immediately removed from student contact during the course of resulting investigations and make the superintendent personally responsible to ensure incidents are properly reported to law enforcement and the state Education Department.

Documents show that administrators at Douglas Anderson received numerous complaints about Clayton’s behavior toward students over the 20 years he spent in the school’s vocal department but did not act on them in a meaningful way until after Clayton was arrested in 2023.

“When a parent or a student, or an adult, or someone in the school building, feels like something just isn’t right, you’re better off reporting it than not,” Bernier said. “Because that’s how you stop behavior before it gets started.”

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