The fate of the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board’s proposed teacher licensing rules is in the hands of Administrative Law Judge Barbara Case. The time period for written testimony, rebuttals, and rules modifications by PELSB closed July 6. Judge Case has 30 days to make a ruling.
One year after the passage of the Tiered Licensing bill and six months after the formation of the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB), the proposed rules are in the hands of Judge Case. She can approve or reject some or all of the rules by Aug. 7. For the rules she approves, they need to be published in the state register and PELSB needs to approve them.
PELSB board and staff are now operating under the new Tiered law but without rules and with a skeleton IT system for support. Since we are heading into the end of summer, hiring rush for hard-to-fill-positions, the PELSB Standards Advisory Board, of which MREA is a member, recommended that PELSB not implement the new rules before Oct. 1. Through September, schools should use the statute and the guidelines that the board distributed.
The PELSB staff is to be commended for processing 600 standard licenses by hand for new teachers in June. MREA urges members to remember to be “hard on the problem, and easy on the people” when communicating with the PELSB staff this summer and school year. They did not create this log jam of a new law and new board that resulted in rules not being adopted by July 1.
MREA submitted further testimony regarding Related Service Professionals to Judge Case urging for the following determinations:
- Reject the PELSB proposed rules regarding ‘related services professionals’
- Direct PELSB to propose new rules for School Counselor and School Psychologist using all four licensure tiers such that there is a probability of increasing the supply of these professionals to better match demand
- Direct PELSB to seek legislative clarification on how to integrate Speech Language Pathologist (SLP), School Nurse and School Social Worker into all four teacher licensure tiers
- Impose a temporary solution of allowing the current rules regarding all five of these related service professionals to remain in place until the legislature provides direction to PELSB and a new set of rules can be put through a hearing process
View June 29 Letter by MREA Executive Director Fred Nolan regarding Related Service Professionals
View June 1 Letter by MREA Executive Director Fred Nolan regarding Related Service Professionals
View final version of the proposed rules and transcript of the rules hearing
