photo by: Associated Press

In this Monday, Dec. 14, 2015 file photo, Kansas Supreme Court Justices prepare to hear arguments during a session in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner, File)

Topeka ? The Kansas Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday in a case that challenges a 2014 law repealing the right of veteran teachers to a due process hearing before they could be summarily fired.

The Kansas National Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, argues among other things that lawmakers violated a provision of the Kansas Constitution in adopting the law by passing a bill that contained multiple subjects.

“This was an 11th-hour passage of a bill to satisfy the court’s order in Gannon,” KNEA general counsel David Schauner said, referring to the court’s first order on school funding equity. “And they stuck in a substantive issue concerning teacher due process. You can’t essentially log-roll a matter of substance into an appropriations bill.”

The bill that lawmakers passed in the waning days of the 2014 session began as an appropriations bill for higher education. But it eventually became an omnibus education bill that had both appropriations and policy provisions for both K-12 and higher education.

Teacher due process rights, often referred to as “teacher tenure,” had been in place since the 1950s. Those rights guaranteed that teachers who had passed their probationary period and had been with a district for three years were entitled to an independent due process hearing before they could be summarily fired or have their contract nonrenewed for the following year.

That effectively secured a teacher’s job until he or she retired or chose to leave voluntarily, unless it could be shown before an independent hearing panel that there was good cause to dismiss the teacher.

Critics of that system argued that it made it too difficult to fire bad or ineffective teachers and put too much power in the hands of teachers unions like KNEA.

Gov. Sam Brownback said in signing the bill that it gives local school boards the ability to make their own policies on teacher hiring and retention.

The Lawrence school district is one of those that did adopt a new, modified tenure policy after the law went into effect, allowing teachers to appeal a firing or nonrenewal directly to the school board, rather than an independent hearing panel.

But KNEA has argued that repeal of due process rights could enable school boards and administrators to get rid of teachers they don’t like for any reason at all. Furthermore, the 2014 bill applied retroactively, which meant teachers who had already earned tenure status had it taken away from them with passage of the bill.

In addition to the constitutional challenge now before the Supreme Court, Schauner said KNEA is litigating individual cases around the state where school districts did not renew the contracts of previously tenured teachers without holding a due process hearing.

In August, a judge in Butler County ruled in favor of the Flint Hills school district, throwing out a lawsuit filed by two teachers whose contracts were not renewed and who previously were protected under the due process law.

Schauner said KNEA argued that the teachers had a vested property right in their jobs and that the school district, under the new law, was able to take away that property right without due process of law.

The judge, however, said the legislative process itself constituted due process of law and that teachers do not have a constitutionally protected property right in continued employment.

Schauner said similar cases involving individual teachers are pending in Wyandotte and Ellis counties, and that he will soon file another such case in Sedgwick County.