Essex Superior Court Judge Janice W. Howe has ordered four individual Marblehead teachers to report for duty at their regularly scheduled work hours on Tuesday, Nov. 26, and every scheduled workday thereafter, even if the teachers strike persists.
Howe made her ruling late Monday after a 3 p.m. hearing in her Lawrence courtroom on an emergency motion filed earlier in the day by the Commonwealth Employment Relations Board.
The day before, the CERB had issued its own ruling that teachers Jonathan Heller, Sally Shevory, Hannah Hood and Alison Carey violated G.L.c. 150E, §9A in their individual capacities and needed to return to work.
The CERB’s ruling came after the Marblehead School Committee filed a petition with the Department of Labor Relations on Nov. 19 requesting a strike investigation, which named the four teachers individually.
The Marblehead Education Association declined to comment on the judge’s order Monday night, but one of the teachers named, MEA Co-president Jonathan Heller, spoke about the risk recently.
“What are they going to do, go after my kids’ college fund?” Heller asked at a Nov. 21 press conference. “Are they going to try and take my house? Are they going to try to put us in jail?”
MEA Co-President Sally Shevory said the School Committee’s request for the order felt like a “slap in the face.”
Judge Howe ordered the four teachers to return immediately to their assigned work locations beginning on Nov. 26, unless the schools remained closed. In that instance, Heller, Shevory, Hood and Carey are to report to the superintendent “to determine their assigned work locations.”
If the four teachers fail to comply with the order, any party can request another hearing before Howe, which will be held “without delay,” the judge’s order reads.
Before the CERB, the four individually named teachers argued that the CERB had abandoned the practice of applying §9A to the conduct of individual employees by the late 1980s.
But the CERB rejected that argument, distinguishing the present circumstances from a Brookline case the Marblehead teachers had cited in support of their argument. In the Brookline case, the strike in question had only been contemplated and had not yet begun, the CERB noted.
The CERB was able to point to other cases in which it had found individual liability for union officers who participated in a strike or were picketing.
The School Committee’s initial request for a strike investigation with the DLR on Nov. 8 named only the Marblehead Education Association as an organization. That same day, the CERB found the union in violation of §9A and brought its order to Howe. The judge first issued a preliminary injunction and then found the MEA to be in contempt of that order, triggering a series of escalating fines.
