Re “After Prodding, ACE Moves First with a ‘Demand to Bargain’”
[Editor’s Note: The parents who were signatories to this letter represent four separate schools in the School District.]
Debbie Hamme of the classified union ACE, the Assn. of Classified Employees, threatened legal action against the School District in 2011 that resulted in the District taking control of the one-year old Lin Howe School booster program away from parents. Those parent-funded employees became employees of the District and…members of Ms. Hamme’s union. She gave a written demand to bargain to the District on Friday over the fate of the adjunct program at El Marino Language School that has been successfully run by a model parent-District partnership for 25 years.
Ms. Hamme's recent defense of her actions (a Feb. 17 letter that is appended in full below) was full of errors that have served to escalate the conflict between her and parents in the District. She claims that it is the parents seeking to defend their rights as being the cause of what is upsetting parents; she and her defender on the School Board, President Karlo Silbiger, continue to deny that it was her threat of legal action – and now her meritless demand bargain–that are the sole problems here.
The most upsetting element of her letter, however, was her attempt to divide parents from different schools against each other by labeling some of us “haves” and others as “have-nots.” She may find such divide-and-conquer tactics work in her union, but they have no place when you are dealing with parents and their children. To say we are disappointed by Ms. Hamme's tactics would be an understatement.
Worse, her attempt to get parents to turn on each other is based on a gross distortion of the facts. She claims El Marino has 20 adjunct positions and La Ballona's immersion program has zero. Ms. Hamme’s arguments are based on a lack of understanding of our programs:
• La Ballona parents have raised money for adjuncts or other assistants but had problems getting the District to accept funding for those positions. This may have been due to a lack of a written policy or because of Ms. Hamme’s threats to litigate against the District. But, contrary to Ms. Hamme’s assertions, it was not because La Ballona parents are “have-nots.”
• El Marino has 20 part-time positions of three hours or less per day. That equates to 7.5 full-time positions (not 20) for a program that serves over 750 children.
• El Marino’s program is over six times the size of the immersion program at La Ballona. La Ballona is only in the third year of its excellent program and has 132 children in K-2 grades.
• Immersion children at La Ballona have the assistance of instructional aides in one-third of their immersion grades (kindergarten, but not yet first or second grades).
• The immersion model at La Ballona is not the same style of immersion as El Marino’s. Both models are proven and successful immersion education methodologies, but they are not identical and they have different needs.
Ms. Hamme should stop trying to play parents against each other. At the end of the day, we have something in common that she clearly does not share:
All of us parents share a hope that what is best for kids will guide the decisions by all School Board members.
Ms. Hamme has never had a role in parent-funded programs such as the ALLEM (Advocates for Language Learning, El Marino) adjunct program–and she never will. Parents throughout the District stand united in this sentiment. She does not have the right to negotiate anything regarding our program. By state law, she lost her legal right to object to the program six months after the El Marino program was established in the 1990s (Government Code section 3514.5(a)(1)) despite her bizarre claim that she just learned about the adjuncts.
Ms. Hamme further implied that the El Marino program violates federal law. She is wrong, and she should know better. The law she cites applies to District employees, not volunteers or employees of non-profits who are provided to the District at no taxpayer cost.
At the end of the day, Ms. Hamme has yet to articulate any reasons why our children would benefit from having the adjuncts be members of her union instead of employees of the parent non-profit that has run it for 25 years.
Any parent in the District who supports the rights of parents to be part of parent-district partnerships should be alarmed by Ms. Hamme.
But a greater threat is that her campaign against parent rights will singlehandedly prevent our District from recruiting strong candidates to replace the retiring Supt. Patti Jaffe. As she escalates her campaign against parent-funded programs, she is ensuring the presence of 100-plus angry parents at all of the upcoming School Board meetings –not to mention the corresponding media attention. If she persists, then we hope she will actually come to one of these meetings to hear the parents. By not having any representative from her union explain themselves at the last School Board meeting, she showed disrespect to parents. Her divide-and-conquer letter furthered that impression of a lack of respect.
A final message to Ms. Hamme: The only “haves” in this District are parents and staff who have school children as their primary concern; the only “have-nots” are so-called leaders who do not have as a primary concern the welfare of school children. Your actions in this regard, Ms. Hamme, speak louder than your words.
The letter writers may be contacted through kiletreese@yahoo.com
Debbie Hamme’s letter of Feb. 17:
The union representing the support staff of Culver City Unified School District is calling for the website parentshaverights.org, as well as parent Yahoo groups, to refrain from posting erroneous or misleading information that is fanning the flames surrounding the issue of the El Marino Language School adjuncts.
The Assn. of Classified Employees-Culver City fully supports parent involvement and participation in their children’s education. Unfortunately, there is a lot of theory, rather than fact, being put out in the public domain that is unnecessarily upsetting parents. It is not, nor has it ever been, our intention to disrupt the El Marino language program or replace the existing adjuncts with other District employees. While we believe that the adjuncts are performing our bargaining unit work, there is more than enough room for compromise, and we urge El Marino parents, as well as parents throughout the community, to give us a chance to work through this process collaboratively with the District.
We are aware that volunteers throughout the District may be doing comparable work to our unit members in classrooms every day, but there is a definite distinction to be made between parent volunteers who are in the classroom intermittently and paid employees that do our work on a daily basis. I’ve read several accounts of this issue in recent days that refer to the adjuncts as “paid volunteers.” But how is that accurate when by definition a volunteer is a “person who performs a service willingly and without pay”? We are also aware that there are employees in the District whose salaries are paid by various parent fundraising groups, and those positions are not at issue, either—nor will they be in the future.
At issue, however, are approximately twenty positions at El Marino Language School that have been funded by Advocates for Language Learning, El Marino (ALLEM). There are a few different concerns that surround this issue. Several years ago, when the federal law No Child Left Behind went into effect, all of the members of our unit had to become “highly qualified” in order to keep their jobs. The federal criterion that needed to be met by anyone working with students in the classroom was an A.A. degree or better—or equivalent training. In an effort to avoid a massive layoff of our members and to ensure that our members became “highly qualified,” ACE negotiated with CCUSD to provide that training at no cost to the employees, and it was taught in-house. As a result, all current District employees working as support professionals in our District – instructional assistants, librarians, even P.E. aides – have met this criterion. If the adjuncts at El Marino are not already highly qualified, they would be given an opportunity to take the same District-provided course to enable them to meet the same qualifications. This benefits not only the adjuncts, but our students.
Secondly, while we applaud all of the parents in our District for their commitment to our schools and students, we realize that not all parent groups will be equally successful in their fundraising efforts. This creates an unfortunate disparity between our schools and creates a climate of “haves” and “have-nots.” For any parent in the community who does not think this would ever happen, you should be aware that while El Marino is fortunate enough to have 20 adjuncts at their school, La Ballona, which also hosts a Spanish Immersion program has none for their immersion students. So how can the modeling of target language be an integral part of the immersion experience for the students at one site, but not for the students of the same program at another? El Rincon School has four instructional assistants for the entire school, and three of them are restricted to working with only Title I students and split their time among 23 classrooms.
Even if we were to assume that this inequity did not exist, can you imagine a district in which every site had a successful booster club that had total autonomy over who they hired, fired or how much they paid “their” employees? In what position does that place the District? What is their liability if employees of the booster clubs are involved in legal actions brought by parents or students? Do we even think for a minute that the District would be held harmless if this should happen? Has anyone thought of the chaos that would result from having seven different “employers” within one small District? And last but certainly by no means least, we’ve seen a lot of rhetoric out there from parents who “support” unions, are actual members of unions, value the important work that unions do, have worked for unions, or value the work the classified employees of this District do every day, but somehow feel it’s appropriate to demonize me in public for wanting to provide the adjuncts they “love” a living wage, a few paid sick days and a few paid holidays by bringing them into my unit. Contrary to what you may have been told, this will not destroy the program at El Marino. It will enhance it.
To all of the people who have posted in their Yahoo groups or Letters to the Editor that I should be “ashamed” of myself for wanting to improve someone’s quality of life and the quality of education, let me assure you, I am not ashamed of it.
I am proud.
Sincerely,
Debbie Hamme
President
Assn. of Classified Employees-Culver City
Ms. Hamme may be contacted at antiquer01@aol.com
