Tag Archives: uesf

Recap: QTEA, comfort women, and more

Posted on April 27, 2016 by | 1 comment

Due to a work commitment I was an hour late to tonight’s meeting so I was not present for the annual report of the Quality Teacher and Education Act (QTEA) oversight committee this evening. I’ll have to watch a recording of the meeting to fully absorb their report, but I gather that members have raised questions about the district’s carryover of at least some of the annual revenues from this fund.

For review: the QTEA is the district’s parcel tax, passed by voters in June 2008. In 2016-17, property owners will be assessed $238.68 per parcel, generating about $40 million in revenue to support teacher compensation, professional development, technology and innovation in the school district. The QTEA sunsets June 30, 2028.

On the carryover issue, I have to do more research because I  missed the opportunity to ask some key questions tonight. The contention is that the district should be putting more of the annual revenues into teacher compensation now; the rejoinder is that the carryover has been set aside to pay for negotiated salary increases. Given that the district and UESF have just agreed to accelerate salary increases, both these arguments could be moot. I’ve asked for an additional discussion of the QTEA at the budget committee, either May 4 or June 1 depending on scheduling. And as someone who walked a lot of precincts to pass QTEA (before I was elected to the Board), it’s very important to me that we live up to what we promised.

We also had a report on the Our Children, Our Families (OCOF) initiative established by the reauthorization of the Public Education Enrichment Fund and the Children’s Fund in 2014. Some very good work has been done in establishing a steering committee (the OCOF Council) chaired jointly by the Superintendent and Mayor Lee. The group has established a detailed framework (caution, big PDF download) and is working on their first 5-year plan.

After a recess for closed session, we convened a Special Meeting to consider a resolution authored by Commissioners Fewer and Mendoza urging the state to include curriculum about the “comfort women” in the state’s history curriculum standards. (Last fall, the Board unanimously passed a resolution to incorporate information about the comfort women in SFUSD’s history curriculum.)

The “comfort women” were prostitutes who serviced the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. Most people agree that the women — Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indonesian nationals — were forced either by economic or other means into sex slavery, even if the women did at times receive payment. But there the agreement ends. In recent years, activists have sought to compel the Japanese government to issue apologies and reparations to former comfort women. In late 2015, the Japanese government did issue an apology of sorts to Korean comfort women, because the Korean government has been most vocal and forceful in demanding acknowledgement of the Korean women who were enslaved as comfort women. Still, activists argue that other nations deserve the same treatment. For their part, Japan’s supporters (most notably, tonight, Commissioner Murase, who is Japanese-American and has deep ties to Japan) argue that the tone of the comfort women debate is uncomfortably anti-Japanese.

That’s the geopolitics in a nutshell. For myself, the argument that facing historical atrocities is necessary but painful really resonates. Like many innocent Japanese-Americans, Commissioner Murase’s father was interned in a concentration camp in the 1940s, a shameful chapter in United States history. Tonight Commissioner Mendoza recounted her 90-year-old mother’s memory of being hidden in a rice cannister as a young girl in the Philippines during WWII, to make sure she wasn’t kidnapped by Japanese soldiers. My mother remembers being taught to be afraid of “Japs” in 1940s Berkeley, of all places. War makes people do, say and think terrible things. I think our children deserve to know that, and (if we do our jobs well) know better.

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SF educators to receive raises sooner

Posted on April 23, 2016 by | Comments Off on SF educators to receive raises sooner

I have heard from many constituents regarding UESF’s grievance with the school district on the implementation schedule of wage increases agreed-upon as part of the three-year contract expiring June 30, 2017.

Good news: the school district and UESF have agreed to accelerate the schedule of raises so that all educators represented by UESF will receive a five percent raise starting with their first regularly-scheduled paycheck after July 1, 2016. Here is the Superintendent’s announcement:

We are all so deeply grateful for the powerful and critically important work our teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, and other UESF members do every day for our students. That is why I wanted to take this opportunity to share some great news with all of you, even though it directly impacts only UESF members.

SFUSD and UESF have reached an agreement today to move the original January 2017 raise to the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. Given this decision, every UESF member will receive a 5% raise at the start of the school year, effectively moving the planned second salary increment of 2.25% up by six (6) months.  The raises will be implemented in the first paycheck of the school year for all UESF members, both classified and certificated. Originally, the contract called for a 2.75% raise for the pay period starting in July 2016 and a 2.25% raise for the pay period starting in January 2017.

. . .  The agreement effectively settles the existing grievances related to the timing of the second salary increment to the mutual satisfaction of both the Union and the District.

As the school year comes to a close, SFUSD was able to find cost savings and wanted to contribute these savings to as many employees’ salaries as possible.  This agreement will, in effect, result in 6 more months of increased salaries than previously planned.

We know this is a challenging time to afford living in the Bay Area. The staggered pay schedule that has been in effect for more than 20 years resulted in confusion this winter as some UESF employees received their raises in January and some in February. Unfortunately, this placed added stress on those teachers who thought they would see their increase earlier in the calendar year.

In addition to helping our valued current UESF members start next school year with a higher base salary, we hope this pay increase acceleration will also help us address our projected recruitment challenge due to the national teacher shortage. Higher bottom line salaries for UESF members starting in July 2016 will hopefully entice more teacher candidates and others as they explore their options.

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Recap: November 18 2014

Posted on November 19, 2014 by | 5 comments

Not much on the agenda tonight, but a long meeting nevertheless — followed by closed session!

Most of the Board’s time this evening was spent listening to public comment:

  • A group of parents from Mission Education Center came to tell us not to relocate students from Daniel Webster ES to their site when construction begins on that school next year. The construction will make Webster unusable for the 2015-16 school year, so the district staff is evaluating several options (none of them very popular) for housing Webster staff and students during the construction. Mission Education Center (a newcomer school that is serving large numbers of unaccompanied minors coming to S.F.) and Starr King have been two options under consideration. Last month, we heard from Starr King families that their site cannot accommodate all or part of the Webster enrollment.  Discussions continue on finding the least disruptive way to get the construction under way while continuing to provide Webster staff and students with a place to teach and learn in reasonable comfort.
  • A group of parents from Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy brought us a petition signed by about 100 parents asking for something to be done to help their school move forward. There have been several years of problems, from distrust between staff and parents to faltering parent involvement, and culminating with prolonged absences in several classroom due to teacher leaves and other issues. Parents who testified to the Board tonight were invited to meet with Deputy Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero and Assistant Superintendent Richard Curci (who supervises the school) , and after the meeting the administration reported that the meeting was very productive. I hope so. Leaders in the school’s Castro district neighborhood feel very strongly about supporting the school that bears Harvey Milk’s name. The neighborhood is affluent, and the student body is already very diverse. There’s no reason why this school shouldn’t be cherished by its parents, and I don’t blame the frustration of families whose children have endured weeks of classrooms with substitutes or sometimes no teacher at all. At the enrollment fair, President Fewer and I spoke with an HMCRA family who was very frustrated that their 5th grader’s classroom had been hit hard by the substitute shortage. The little girl was there and looked almost humiliated when her mother described to me that she had been placed for several days in a Kindergarten class because the class had missed a teacher. Anyway, HMCRA isn’t the only school hit by the sub shortage, but the extended leave of one teacher has meant that parents have really noticed the problem.
  • Several parents and teachers came to talk about our ongoing contract negotiations with United Educators of SF, the union that represents our teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, nurses and other certificated (non administration) staff. The negotiations have been tough and we’ve been working on them a long time. I remain very optimistic that we will come to a deal and that it will provide as much support to our valued staff as fiscally prudent.

A bittersweet part of the evening was the testimony and reading of Commissioner Haney’s “In Support of the Prevention of Gun Violence” resolution. Crafted with lots of input from students at Buena Vista Horace Mann, the resolution seeks to articulate the problem of gun violence in many of our communities, and detail the impact that violence has on young people. It asks the district to take numerous steps to help prevent gun violence, including education for parents and supports and curriculum for students. This resolution was particularly meaningful for the Buena Vista Horace Mann students, because their former classmate Rashawn Williams was tragically killed earlier this fall after a dispute with another student. The process of helping craft this resolution clearly had a healing and galvanizing effect for the teens, and it was very moving to hear their testimony and see their engagement in trying to make something good come out of a terrible tragedy. The resolution passed unanimously.

The Board also accepted the Williams Settlement annual report. Every year, the district must survey building conditions and classroom equipment at its lowest-performing schools. If deficiencies are found, the district must correct those deficiencies and then, using an independent auditor, issue a report to the Board on the problems found and how they were corrected. The requirement dates back to a class action suit filed in 2000 by students in SFUSD against the state of California (Eliezer Williams, et. al. v. California). The suit was settled in 2004 and as part of the settlement the state had to establish uniform complaint procedures and survey/reporting requirements.  This year, 94 percent of classrooms surveyed were adequately staffed and equipped at the beginning of school. Where deficiencies were found — primarily some wiring problems and textbook shortages at a few high schools–the independent auditors reviewed the problems and reported they had been corrected.

* * *

In other news, congratulations to Emily Murase and Hydra Mendoza on being re-elected to the Board earlier this month, and a big congratulations and welcome to Shamann Walton for his successful run. Commissioners (new and returning) will be sworn in in early January.

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Meeting recap: April 22, 2014 – teachers rally, QTEA, and a-g

Posted on April 23, 2014 by | 4 comments

Big raucous rally by UESF members at last night’s meeting. Our teachers, paras, nurses, counselors and security guards are worried — as many San Franciscans are–about the City’s growing income inequality and cost of living. The past five years of budget cuts were very tough on our school employees and last night they let us know  that they need a raise.

The Board and the Superintendent agree — our employees need and deserve a raise. Negotiations are ongoing and I have no doubt that we will be able to come to an agreement that is fair to our employees and is within our means.

We also heard a report from the QTEA (Quality Teacher and Education Act, otherwise known as the Prop. A  2008 $198 parcel tax) oversight committee. This committee serves as the taxpayers’ representatives in overseeing expenditures of  QTEA revenues ($35 million in fiscal 2013, according to the audit we received last night).  The vast majority of those funds go each year to some form of teacher compensation: sub days for teachers and paras receiving professional development, retention bonuses and bonuses for teaching in hard to staff subjects and schools, tuition reimbursement and coaching for teachers seeking to improve their skills, and much more.

The oversight committee reported on these and other uses of the QTEA funds and expressed satisfaction that more funding has gone to professional development in the most recent budget. They continued to express concern about the Board’s decision in 2010 to use the last half year of funding under the tax (payable 20 years from now) in 2010 to defer teacher layoffs — while the oversight committee agrees that the use of the money was appropriate they are concerned that it will represent a “double-dip” over the long term.

Finally, the Board heard a report on the progress of the Class of 2014 towards meeting the a-g graduation requirements. Graduates in 2014 are the first to be expected to meet the UC entrance requirements, otherwise known as the a-g course sequence. Since the Board passed the more stringent graduation requirements in 2010, we have been monitoring the progress of these first graduating classes — 2014 and 2015 — towards meeting it.

While we have made a good amount of progress — especially considering the dismal predictions early on about whether our students would be able to meet the more rigorous standard–there are still a lot of students in the class of 2014 who are not on track to graduate. First, the good news: more than half of the class met the entry requirements  for UC (meaning a C or better in a-g classes) this fall, and another third will likely meet those requirements by the end of this school year. Three-quarters of current 12th graders will meet the requirements to graduate.

The bad news is, of course, that half or more of some subgroups (African American students) are not on track to graduate. It was the right thing to do to increase the rigor of our graduation requirements, but the data for this current class shows the price we have paid for that decision: this class represents, as the Superintendent asserted last night, the most prepared class we have ever graduated from San Francisco Unified. And at the same time we must recognize that this class represents a group of  students who were largely unprepared by our schools for the requirements we are now saying they must meet. I do have every confidence that we will get more of our students over the line by the end of the 2014 school year and in subsequent school years, but at the same time it is important to pause and absorb where we are now.

The crux of the data for the Class of 2014, a snapshot as of February 7, 2014, is here, and here.

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District, UESF reach tentative agreement on a contract

Posted on August 2, 2012 by | Comments Off on District, UESF reach tentative agreement on a contract

Hot off the presses – United Educators of SF and SFUSD have reached a tentative two year agreement (covering 2012-13 and 2013-14) that will restore the number of instructional days to 179.5 and limit the number of forced closure days to 1.5.  This is huge, not only because teachers, paraprofessionals and other UESF members have taken four furlough days in each of the past two years, but also because students will now have the benefit of a full school year (the last day of instruction both years will be designated a half day).

The tentative agreement was reached by the district and UESF bargaining teams last week, and last night was ratified by the UESF Executive Board by a 2-1 margin. Next, the agreement will go to UESF membership with a recommendation to ratify — members will vote in a mail-in election with ballots due by August 20.

“What stands out about this agreement is that, even in the midst of an ongoing economic crisis for public schools in California, we worked together to find a way to make student learning come first by restoring the school year,” said Superintendent [Richard] Carranza. “However, our ability to keep schools open for our children completely hinges on the voters of California passing either or both tax initiatives, Prop. 30 and Prop. 38. Without this, we’ll have to institute as many as 5 additional forced closure days for the upcoming school year and up to 10 additional days for the 2013-14 school year.”

[UESF President] Dennis Kelly pointed out “that the union advocated for the half-day and non-instructional day closures to preserve learning time and to make a statement about the importance of extricating children from the vice of state fiscal failures.”

Major props to the bargaining teams for both sides, who persevered and achieved a good agreement despite some pretty hard feelings earlier in the spring. Assuming UESF membership ratifies the agreement, this is truly a win-win-win for the district, its partners in UESF, and families — who can now look forward to the first day of school without losing precious instructional days and worrying about having to scramble for additional child care to cover scattered forced closure days, or even worse, a prolonged strike.

Read the district’s press release on the agreement here.

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Recap: the rhetoric ratchets up

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 7 comments

If you haven’t noticed rising tensions between the district and its main union, United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), you haven’t been paying attention.  The school district and UESF are again in contract negotiations, as the two-year agreement crafted in June 2010 expires June 30, 2012. In June 2010, the district was facing a $113 million deficit over two years (201o-11 and 2011-12), and UESF members and other employees gave furlough (unpaid) days and other concessions to close that gap.

Those concessions expire on June 30, but the budget crisis is not over, based on an analysis by Deputy Superintendent Myong Leigh at tonight’s meeting. California school districts are required to submit board-approved three-year budgets by June 30 of each year, and the SFUSD figures–based on the passage of tax measures on this November’s ballot–appear in the chart below (note that the figures only represent the Unrestricted General Fund — the largest and least restricted pot of money the district spends). There are additional monies — facilities bond funds, special education funding from the state and Federal government, student nutrition reimbursement and other revenues– that are not included here. Many of these programs (special education and student nutrition are major examples) also require a contribution from the Unrestricted General Fund to continue a minimum level of service. So the figures below do not include revenues from restricted programs but do include any contributions of unrestricted funds that are required to keep programs funded by restricted funds completely solvent.

You might also have heard of two state revenue initiatives just concluding the signature gathering phase to qualify for the ballot — the Governor has one, called the “Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act,” and the California PTA and civil rights attorney Molly Munger have another, called “Our Children Our Future.” Each claim to raise money for education, but it is beyond the scope of this post to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each. Anyway, districts are being encouraged to budget as if the Governor’s initiative passes; to be prudent most are preparing two budgets: “scenario A (taxes pass)” or “scenario B (taxes fail).” Since Governor Brown’s initative trumps Our Children Our Future if both pass, SFUSD and other districts are using pass/fail outcomes for the Governor’s initiative as the best/worst case scenarios.

SCENARIO A: UNRESTRICTED GENERAL FUND IF TAXES PASS

What the numbers mean:   The school district began the current year with $55.8 million in the bank, which includes $16.6 million in “designated reserves.” These are funds that the state will not let districts spend, under any circumstances, because these funds are expected to be available to state regulators if and when an insolvent district is taken over. In plain language, school boards and district administrators do not have the authority to spend designated reserves. In SFUSD’s case, that leaves $18.7 million in cash that can be applied to the 2012-13 beginning balance.

2012-13: If you add the unspendable reserve of $16.6 million to the available $18.7 million in cash left over from 2011-12, you get a beginning balance of $35.3 million. Current spending projections, which include the expiration of the UESF contract concessions from 2010-11 and 2011-12, add up to $372.5 million. Expected state and Federal revenues add up to $318.6 million. After the beginning surplus of $35.3 million is added in and the required unspendable reserve is subtracted, the district is looking at a deficit of $35.5 million at the end of 2012-13.

2013-14 and beyond: Without any cuts (on top of the cuts we have made in previous years), and/or concessions (remember that earlier contract concessions like furlough days expire on June 30,2012), the negative ending balance in 2012-13 and subsequent years (indicated in red in the table above) is is a problem.  The state will take districts over if they cannot demonstrate a positive ending balance at the end of the next fiscal year; they put you on a watch list and/or begin to intervene if you cannot demonstrate a positive ending balance for the following fiscal year or the year after that.

SCENARIO B: UNRESTRICTED GENERAL FUND IF TAXES FAIL

What the numbers mean:  By comparing the A/B scenarios, you can easily tell that revenues take a hit in 2012-13 and 2013-14 if the taxes don’t pass, which has a corresponding effect on the ending balances for each fiscal year. Still, it’s also apparent from Scenario A that even with new revenues, education funding in California is not at all out of the woods.

How things stand now:  There is a great deal of uncertainty around the district’s budget, not just because of the unknown outcome of the tax proposals (both of which may appear on the November 2012 ballot).  In addition, district leadership and UESF are far apart in their understanding of the district’s fiscal situation, and of what is affordable and what is not. Last week, district negotiators declared that they had reached an impasse with UESF, but union negotiators disagreed with that position and believe there has not been sufficient discussion of their proposals.  The district has appealed to the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) to determine whether there is any use in the sides continuing to talk or whether a mediator should be appointed. (It would take hours for me to describe what each side has proposed, so if you are really interested you can find descriptions of district proposals here and descriptions of UESF proposals here).

The bottom line: As a Board Member,  I have to decide whether the projections/scenarios above are valid, and whether the funding priorities that will be proposed in the Superintendent’s 2012-13 budget (to be introduced for first reading in early June) are fiscally responsible and in line with the Board’s policy priorities. On Thursday, UESF is holding the first of two votes required to authorize an eventual strike, and its members must decide much the same things: are the district’s publicly disseminated budget scenarios valid? Are the district’s proposals fiscally responsible and aligned with the district’s academic and policy goals? How do the UESF proposals align with the district’s academic policy goals, and are they equally as fiscally responsible as the district’s proposals?

Determining the answers to these questions is not easy, especially since the picture at the state level is still so unclear. Money that is expected today may fail to materialize if the taxes don’t pass in November.  In declaring impasse, the district has asked for an independent mediator to evaluate the arguments on both sides, and help craft a proposed settlement that (in his or her judgment) addresses both sides.

So, layoffs . . .  Until there is an agreement, the district must take steps to be sure its three-year budget is balanced ahead of the June 30 deadline. In February, the Board voted to issue 333 preliminary layoff notices to certificated employees (administrators, teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, etc.) — those preliminary notices must be issued by March 15.  In its resolution to issue those notices, the Board agreed to skip teachers in 14 Superintendent’s Zone schools, a controversial decision that required review by an Administrative Law Judge.

Yesterday, the judge issued her decision and ruled that the district must conduct layoffs according to seniority, instead of skipping teachers at some schools altogether. Though many Board members believe our original action would have had benefits to the Superintendent’s Zone schools — many of which are historically low-performing–after the judge’s decision we unanimously rejected the Superintendent’s proposal to proceed with the skip and instead adopted (6-1) a substitute resolution that follows seniority to issue permanent layoff notices to 210 teachers, paraprofessionals, nurses, counselors, etc. and eight administrators.  As I said in my remarks before voting tonight, the board tried to do something noble by attempting to keep staffs at the Superintendent’s Zone schools intact — now we will just have to find other ways to support these schools and reduce their high rates of staff turnover.

Other items

  • A petition to open a new KIPP charter high school was introduced and sent to the Curriculum and Budget committees. It will return to the full Board for a vote probably on June 14.
  • A technical fix to the Board’s policy on required qualifications for new JROTC instructors (requiring them to enroll in a P.E. credential program soon after being hired rather than the original language, which stated they must already be enrolled in a P.E. credential program) will be heard in the Personnel and Budget committees and return to the Board sometime in June.
  • Parents from Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy came to protest the  hiring process for their interim principal.
  • A member of the public became angry when he saw President Yee and I chuckling during the layoff discussion — I can understand why it would seem insensitive to be joking during that discussion, and the timing was bad. Still, what we were laughing about was unrelated to the layoff matter being discussed — it was rueful acknowledgement that we had utterly bumbled parliamentary procedure in introducing an “amendment for substitution”  as a “substitute motion” in place of the Superintendent’s original motion, and then calling for a second at the wrong time. Our mistakes required not one but two gentle corrections by Ms. Evelyn Wilson, our long-suffering Parliamentarian.
  • Read “Schools Under Stress,” a report issued today by the education think tank Edsource.  It’s a very thorough discussion of all the budget woes facing California schools.

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Recap: Speedy meeting is not without controversy

Posted on October 12, 2010 by | Comments Off on Recap: Speedy meeting is not without controversy

Tonight’s agenda was straightforward without much in the way of Board business or debate. The Board unanimously passed Commissioner Fewer’s resolution recommitting the district to its pledge to keep student information safe from military recruiters and the Joint Advertising Market Research Studies (JAMRS) database they access.  Oakland Unified and Berkeley Unified have recently passed similar resolutions.

But a simmering controversy over the district’s pension offerings for paraprofessionals has boiled over in recent days and several dozen paraprofessionals and teachers rallied before the Board meeting to demand that the district address the problems with their retirement plan. Essentially, and without revealing the substance of continuing, confidential negotiations between UESF and the district, SFUSD and UESF negotiated an agreement in 1992 that took paraprofessionals out of Social Security and put them in a private retirement plan. Though UESF agreed to this plan and its members ratified that agreement, it is now apparent to everyone that our employees would have been better off had they stayed in Social Security. However, there are different opinions about how to address this wrong, what the district’s legal liability is, and even about whether our employees themselves might bear some future liability. In short, it’s a mess, but one that involves the real lives and futures of valued SFUSD employees.

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Recap: It’s oh so quiet

Posted on May 25, 2010 by | 10 comments

Scholar Spencer Huston receives a $500 check from Carpenters Local 22 President Manny Flores

Tonight’s meeting was unusually short and quiet, even though we did have a sizeable group from John O’Connell High School to protest the layoff of the school’s wellness coordinator. This employee is certainly a major asset to a site that has more than its share of students who really need her services, and it was difficult to hear about the potential impact on her students if she leaves. Board members have asked district staff to continue to work on the situation, and I hope there will be a solution that keeps this employee where she wants to remain: serving the students of John O’Connell High School.
Also of note on tonight’s agenda:

  • Proposals establishing open enrollment in honors classes and revising Board policy on graduation requirements were withdrawn by the Superintendent, pending review by the Board’s Curriculum and Budget committees;
  • A tentative agreement between UESF and the school district was ratified by the Board — for their part, UESF members are in the process of ratifying the agreement by mail-in ballot;
  • UESF, UASF, the Association of Black Educators and the Carpenters’ Local 22 announced winners of their annual scholarships — some of the winners even got checks right then and there! (See photo above);

The board also heard a presentation on the district’s plan for the 10 SFUSD schools that landed on the state’s list of the 5 percent of schools in the “persistently underperforming” category. While the staff is still putting the finishing touches on the district’s application for School Improvement Grants (landing on the state’s list makes a district eligible to apply for these grants, also called “SIG”), Deputy Superintendent Carranza told the Board tonight that the Superintendent has decided the following:

  • To apply for all 10 schools this year — this has been a tricky decision because the Federal government says that a district can apply for a few schools at a time rather than committing to work on all of its schools in any given year; the state disagrees and says that districts must apply for all schools at once or risk losing out on SIG funding;
  • To implement the application over time, so that some of the schools will have a planning year and others won’t;
  • To implement the least prescriptive “transformation” model at five (as yet unnamed schools), and the more prescriptive “turnaround” model at four schools (also unnamed until the application is finalized). Both models require replacing a principal who has been at the school longer than two years, and the “turnaround” model also calls for replacing 50 percent of the staff at the school. One school will be closed temporarily, and rebuilt from the ground up.

This decision is probably the best we could have done considering the carrot — potentially millions in extra funding — the state is dangling for participating in the SIG program. There’s also a big stick, since state law requires us to eventually apply one of four intervention models to every school that lands on the persistently underperforming list — whether we ask for the money or not. Still, the turnaround model is going to hurt: it means displacing half the staff at four schools.

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Is the end in sight? Recapping an eventful day

Posted on May 12, 2010 by | 3 comments

El Dorado teachers protest layoffs during public comment.

I’m not sure whether tonight’s headline should be “Board approves 349 permanent layoff notices” or “District, teachers union reach ‘conceptual’ agreement.” Both are true, and equally newsworthy to readers of this blog.

I’m going to give a lot of credit to the leadership of UESF, who persevered and got to an agreement they could take back to their membership after many long and inconclusive hours at the negotiating table. This agreement, subject to ratification by the union membership in coming days, took shape just minutes before tonight’s Board meeting convened. I can’t give many details, but I can say that it keeps elementary class sizes at current levels through the 2010-11 school year. I can also say that earlier today, any agreement looked far away indeed.  So kudos to the union leaders and to district staff, equally bleary-eyed after a very long and sometimes bitter negotiation. I truly hope the membership will agree that what UESF leadership will present is the best that could be wrought under the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Unfortunately, there will still be layoffs. Unlike almost any other urban district in California, we have not had to confront layoffs in recent years due to the City’s Rainy Day Fund.  But that fund is now depleted, and it is unfortunately time to face what others across the state have been dealing with for at least the past 18 months, if not longer. First, let’s review the numbers:

  • $113 million — the amount of the district’s projected budget shortfall through 2010-11;
  • $3.6 billion — the shortfall between the estimated 2010-11 state revenues in the Governor’s January budget and the current estimate expected to be released in Friday’s May Revise (which could mean additional cuts);
  • $18.1 million — the amount the school district received from the Rainy Day Fund in 2008-09
  • $24.5 million — the amount the school district received from the Rainy Day Fund in 2009-10;
  • $6 million — the amount the school district expects to receive from the Rainy Day Fund in 2010-11;
  • 502 — number of FTE positions sent preliminary (“March 15”) layoff notices for 2010-11;
  • 348.72 — number of FTE positions to be sent permanent (“May 15”) notices for 2010-11.

Of course, going from 502 to just under 350 is good, but nothing to celebrate over. Once the “conceptual agreement” between the district and UESF is ratified, district staff said, the number of FTEs holding permanent layoff notices should decrease to 195 or so. That’s better, but still not something anyone will feel good about.  Chief Administrative Officer Roger Buschmann told the Board tonight that this number — 195 FTEs holding permanent layoff notices — could go even lower as the summer progresses.

In attendance at tonight’s meeting were many teachers who urged us to say no to all the layoff notices, I guess because they were under the impression that we had a choice.  We didn’t. In the end, five out of the six Commissioners in attendance voted in favor of issuing permanent layoff notices — not because we wanted to or because doing so gives us any kind of tactical advantage, but because it is the only way to keep the district safe from the possibility of state takeover.

The largest contingent of commenters were from El Dorado Elementary, a school that has been disproportionately affected by the current round of layoff notices. I give the El Dorado staff a great deal of credit for shining a hard light on the equity issues that arise when 67% of the teachers and other staff at a hard-to-staff school receive layoff notices. I admire the way they have hung together and supported each other through this stressful year, and I appreciate their ongoing commitment to their students and to their school. They are absolutely right that it makes no sense to give teachers stipends and extra professional development to work at hard-to-staff schools if you are just going to turn around and lay them off a year or two later.

The El Dorado staff is stwrongly under the impression that if the district had made different choices, all the layoffs at their school would be unnecessary. First they said we could have skipped their school with layoff notices (we couldn’t, under state law). Then they said we spent too much money on consultants (really?) Tonight they said the layoffs would have a huge impact on the children who attend their school, and on that I couldn’t agree with them more. Most of us on the Board believe strongly that a great injustice will be done if the El Dorado layoffs stand (I have some hope that they will not, based on the implications of the conceptual agreement between the union and the district).  But it’s simply wrong to say that it would be possible for us to spare El Dorado — or any other school — from the impact of cuts totaling $1,365 per student in just the current year.

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Superintendent says mediation dates are set

Posted on April 26, 2010 by | Comments Off on Superintendent says mediation dates are set

In an e-mail to district employees today, the Superintendent said the district and the union have agreed on three mediation dates in the coming weeks. Mr. Garcia wrote: “We are totally in agreement with UESF: It’s time to settle the contract.”  Read the full e-mail >>>>

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