Teachers to get protection from education offices after years of facing complaints alone

BUSAN — Education offices around the country are building dedicated teams to take on the malicious complaints, abuse reports and legal disputes that teachers have largely been left to fight by themselves.

Busan will open teacher protection centers at each of its five district education offices in September. Gyeonggi launched a 300-strong network this month that pairs a teacher with a case officer who stays on the case from the first fact-check to its closure.

Each Busan center will be staffed by five people: a director, a lawyer, an education supervisor and two administrative employees. The centers will investigate reports of interference in teachers' work and run the regional teachers' rights protection committees, the bodies that decide whether an incident counts as interference. They will also connect teachers to legal help and counseling services.

The centers will support legal representation for teachers reported for child abuse to accompany them at committee hearings and take on malicious complaints. A pool of about 60 advisory lawyers appointed by the Busan Metropolitan Office of Education last year will assist when needed. While the office already runs one protection center, the new ones will sit closer to the schools they serve.

"Protecting educational activity goes beyond the individual teacher. It is an important foundation for guaranteeing students a stable education," Busan Superintendent Kim Seok-jun said. "With the protection centers at the heart of it, we will provide fast, expert support from the place closest to the school."

Gyeonggi's provincial education office launched a force of 300 teachers' rights protection officers on Aug. 22, drawn from three groups: 110 current and retired teachers, 30 residents of the province and 160 outside experts, among them lawyers, doctors, police officers and conflict mediators. Each officer is paired with a teacher who faces a complaint or abuse allegations. The officer stays with that teacher from the initial fact-finding through legal advice, psychological recovery and follow-up.

Gangwon has built a rapid response team around a teachers' rights support group that reports directly to the superintendent. Daejeon is pursuing a protection officer system meant to carry a case from intake and on-site response through investigation, mediation and legal and psychological support.

The Ministry of Education wants a body of its own overseeing teachers' rights and school complaints policy by the end of the year. It is in talks with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety over the size, staffing, name and functions of that office.

Ulsan is taking a different route alongside its existing protection center. Its plan to rebuild trust in the education community brings in students, parents, school staff and residents, with communication programs at each school and days set aside for dialogue. A steering committee chaired by the superintendent and a citywide residents' group will hold roundtables and policy forums. The city believes institutional support alone will not work unless the relationships between the people involved in education are repaired as well.

The Education Ministry's survey for the 2024 school year found that regional committees reviewed 4,234 alleged interference cases and recognized 3,925 of them, or 92.7 percent, as genuine. Among incidents caused by students, the most common was deliberately disrupting a class after refusing to follow instructions at 32.4 percent, followed by insult and defamation at 26 percent.

Committee hearings have climbed steeply over five years, from 1,197 in 2020 to 2,269 in 2021 and 3,035 in 2022. They peaked at 5,050 in 2023, the year the death of a teacher at a Seoul elementary school brought tens of thousands of teachers into the streets. The ministry attributes both the spike and the 2024 figure to sharper awareness in schools and to a rule change that made convening a committee mandatory.

"For the education offices to step in directly on interference cases, which until now were all but dumped on schools or on individual teachers, is progress," said Kim Dong-seok, the head of teachers' rights policy at the Korean Federation of Teachers' Associations. "It should also ease the burden on teachers who are not versed in the law or in procedure and who have had to face malicious complaints, child abuse reports, investigations and lawsuits alone."

The Special Act on the Improvement of Teachers' Status and the Protection of Their Educational Activities governs the committees. They moved from individual schools to the district education offices in March 2024, a change meant to make the reviews more expert and objective.

"For these units to actually exercise authority, the scope of their work, their powers and where responsibility lies have to be set out clearly in the teacher status act and other laws," Kim said. "The Education Ministry needs to take overall charge and establish common operating standards and a legal foundation so the systems do not end up running differently in every region."

BY KIM MIN-JU [[email protected]]