A Polk County School Board member is urging the district to create a policy to deal with administrators having non-marital romantic relationships with their subordinates.
- Three separate allegations of misconduct in last 2 months
- Board member addressed need for policy in blog post
- Policy could prompt legal challenges if created
Board member Billy Townsend put forth his idea in a blog post entitled "Power, Sex, and Leadership: An Urgent Policy Need." He said he started looking into creating the policy after hearing three separate allegations of misconduct surrounding this topic within the past two months.
Two of those allegations, according to Townsend, are currently under investigation. The third has resolved itself, as the two parties involved have left the district.
According to Townsend's blog post, he’d like a policy that “mandates disclosure of any romantic/sexual relationship between people in a supervisory relationship. If you’re dating as teachers, and one of you becomes an AP, you need to let your principal know."
He also wants the policy to make it clear “that people who are or have been in romantic/sexual relationships cannot supervise each other.”
“If an assistant principal and a teacher have had a relationship in the past or in a relationship currently, they should not be in the same school with one supervising the other. That’s my preference,” said Townsend.
The district’s current nepotism policy bans administrators from directly supervising relatives at the same work location and mandates disclosure to the superintendent. Anyone who lives in the same residence as the administrator is considered a relative.
Polk School Board Member Billy Townsend
Support for, challenges to proposed policy
The President of the Polk County Education Association, Marianne Capoziello, said she supports looking into Townsend’s idea.
“It's happened enough that I think it’s wise to be proactive now and put in a policy,” said Capoziello.
However, Capoziello wants to make sure the policy the district drafts is fair.
“We don’t want it where, 'Oh, we’re always going to move the woman if the man’s a principal,'" Capoziello said. "We have to figure out a way to make sure it’s an equitable policy. The devil is always in the details of what you put on paper.”
Legal expert Peter Helwig, who has been practicing employment law for 40 years, said the district could run into legal trouble if it creates such a policy.
“If you were to just simply have a policy that says if you’re having an intimate relationship with another employee, you should not supervise them, that seems to me would be possibly legal," Helwig said. "But to require a mandatory reporting goes way beyond the line that the courts have drawn and would not survive a legal test."
Helwig went on to say he's never seen such a policy enacted, and it could violate people’s right to privacy and “right to freedom from discrimination, particularly if they’re lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
Policy in other counties?
In his blog, Townsend wrote that he’s “received several examples of model policies, including one from Bay County, which seems to be the only Florida district that we know has one.”
When we checked with other Tampa Bay area school districts, we learned Hillsborough County has a nepotism policy, but it doesn’t address non-marital romantic relationships. Pasco County has a fraternization policy that specifies,“administrators shall refrain from dating or engaging in consensual sexual relationships with employees they supervise.”
Pasco's nepotism policy also considers a relative any person who resides in the same residence as the supervisor.
Polk’s superintendent said staff is researching how this issue is handled across the state and the nation.
Townsend requested Tuesday that the topic be put on the next work session agenda, but that hasn’t happened yet.