The 2012-13 Contract Package has been updated to take into account amendments from the Regular and Called Sessions of the 82nd Legislature in 2011 and to further refine our approach to the decision in Kelley v. North East ISD.

Now, more than ever, it is important to ensure your contract forms preserve employer perogatives while also meeting the courts' standards related to informing employees of the contractual obligations.

Whether your district has been updating its contract forms annually or hasn't made a change in 20 years, NOW IS THE TIME to change your employment contract forms to protect the school district's limited financial resources and strengthen the district's position in contracting.

NOTE: If your district has never purchased this package or if your copy is older than 2009-10, the cost will be $350 for a full version.

If your district has the 2009-10 version or newer, the updated CD-ROM is reduced.  Order your updated CD-ROM by selecting - Contract Package UPDATE

Districts may only order this UPDATE if it has our firm's 2009-10 Contract Package version or newer.

The 2012-13 Contract Package has been updated to take into account amendments from the Regular and Called Sessions of the 82nd Legislature in 2011 and to further refine our approach to the decision in Kelley v. North East ISD.

Now, more than ever, it is important to ensure your contract forms preserve employer perogatives while also meeting the courts' standards related to informing employees of the contractual obligations.

Whether your district has been updating its contract forms annually or hasn't made a change in 20 years, NOW IS THE TIME to change your employment contract forms to protect the school district's limited financial resources and strengthen the district's position in contracting.

NOTE: If your district has never purchased this package or if your copy is older than 2009-10, you must order the full version at a cost of $350.  For imformation on the version your district has, please contact (800) 488-9045 or information@edlaw.com.

School administrators often are required to "look into" or "investigate" allegations of wrong-doing by students and employees. The Investigations Manual will help you understand why it is important to conduct an investigation in a particular way, as well as provide you form documents and scripts to facilitate recordkeeping and information gathering related to the allegations.

Unique to this product is a series of flow charts that guide you through each phase of an investigation so that critical steps or details that might haunt you later don't get overlooked.

The Texas Family Code lays out a complicated set of rules regarding parental rights. We have taken the Family Code and the IDEA and broken it down into an easy-to-use chart to assist special education staff in determining who has the right to participate and /or make decisions. For example, you will be able to determine if a parent, guardian, surrogate parent, foster parent, other family member or advocate is entitled to:

• Receive written notice to attend an ARD meeting
• Receive a copy of a student's records
• Request a due process hearing

Answers to these and other difficult questions are on a single laminated legal size sheet. Footnoted explanations are on the flip side.

DVD may only be purchased by districts who also purchase our Harassment and Discrimination Stand Alone DVD.

Court decisions tie employee and district liability directly to whether or not the district has acted reasonably in response to known acts of harassment. A great way to demonstrate "reasonable care" is by showing that you have held trainings, conducted thorough investigations, and promulgated an anti-harassment policy. That is why we created a complete sexual harassment training package, specially designed for school district administrators featuring:

• Step-by-step assistance on conducting a one-hour training session for all employees
• Latest information on student to student sexual harassment
• 13 minute DVD, accompanying trainer's manual, and PowerPoint presentation
• Answers to frequently asked questions, tips on conducting investigations and documenting allegations, and policy recommendations
• Pointers on how to use the materials and how to keep the materials up to date for use in subsequent years 

To protect your liability, every person that comes into contact with your staff, students, and the public should know what sexual harassment is and the reporting obligations, policies, and procedures to follow when an incident occurs. This workbook is not designed to take the place of annual preventing sexual harassment trainings for school district personnel. It is, however, a stand alone training for employees and volunteers that have slipped through the cracks and for whatever reason have not been through your local in-service program, such as mid-year hired, part-time employees, substitute teachers and volunteers. At last, an inexpensive 11 page workbook with a self-test that you can give to every person, taking no more than 15 minutes to complete and saving administrators countless hours in training and retraining. Special features include:

• Easy to read and understand for all staff and volunteers
• Real examples of unwelcome behavior help drive home the point
• Sections on how to prevent an accusation, protect students, and reporting obligations
• Questions to answer throughout the exercise
• A final questionnaire that must be completed and returned to the campus principal
• A tear-out acknowledgment form for your files 

How many times have you or your employees turned to the district's Employee Handbook hoping to find guidance on a particular issue and found nothing, or insufficient text to address your situation? Unfortunately, this happens far too often, and strengthening the handbook for next year does little to help you in the interim. What you need is someone to anticipate the holes in your Handbook prior to publication. Our daily contact with hundreds of clients allows us to do just that. Our Model Employee Handbook was designed with one purpose in mind - to help you do your job with fewer challenges, questions, or confusion from employees.

Our Models are written in a conversational tone to be user friendly and are designed for districts to personalize and tailor. For example, we highlight the parts that require you to make some decisions, show you what can be changed, suggest language for what may be added, and place the directions for personalizing these portions in an instruction box.

Special Features of our Model Employee Handbook include:

• Organized by topics to make it easier for employees to understand how different rules and policies relate to each other
• Expanded table of contents
• Appendix of commonly used forms
• Sections on importance of regular, on-time attendance, vacation, appropriate use of conference periods,staff development, outside employment, rules for district credit cards, necessity of following district curriculum grading guidelines, using films/movies in class
• New to the handbook is specific information to employees about inappropriate social relationships with students.

Note: The CD-ROM is available for $60 to districts that have purchased our 2009-10 version or newer. (Your invoice will reflect the correct amount.)