Fog seems to have been a persistent weather pattern encircling the School District offices in the days since Supt. Patti Jaffe announced the finding of District lawyers regarding the 20 adjuncts at El Marino Language School.
The legal conclusion that the District is not bound to negotiate the adjuncts’ status with a union that hopes to make them members sparked more confusion than clarity across a community when various spokespersons sought to explain and interpret.
Based on community members’ uniformly triumphant remarks at last night’s School Board meeting, some parents who have been at the forefront of organizing and protesting for weeks in defense of the El Marino adjuncts believe the finding represents a parent victory. If it is, it is tiny, temporary and possibly pyrrhic.
The end line in this smoking cross-community debate probably is agonizing months into the future.
There is nothing for either entrenched side yet to celebrate.
Debbie Hamme, President of ACE, the Assn. of Classified Employees, told the newspaper this afternoon she plans to seek a face-to-face meeting with District officials. But the negotiation leader, Leslie Lockhart, newly elevated from Director of Human Resources to Asst. Supt. for Human Resources, is on vacation, Ms. Hamme said. The union president will contact Ms. Lockhart when she returns to work next month.
“We would like to sit down and have another meeting,” Ms. Hamme said. “We still think there are breaches of the contract that need to be discussed.”
After listening to parents speak glowingly at last night’s Board meeting about the District lawyers’ conclusion, “I did get the feeling that the parents thought that perhaps this was a done deal,” Ms. Hamme said. “It is not. Talking to the District really is the first step in this process.”
Ms. Lockhart’s and Ms. Hamme’s teams could meet before or after the next closely watched event, the School Board study session, tentatively scheduled for 5:30 to 7:30 on Election Day, Tuesday, April 10, in the pocket-sized District offices. (The site probably will be changed to accommodate the high degree of community interest.)
The agenda for the study session remains unsettled. It is expected to include a four-way proposal to protect parent-funded enterprises that Board member Laura Chardiet introduced a month ago to resounding silence from a Board majority.
Some parties have the mistaken impression that ACE will turn directly to the somewhat mysterious Public Employee Relations Board, PERB, and file a grievance. “Not so,” said Ms. Hamme. “The first step is not PERB. The first step is to sit down and discuss the District’s letter to us, which said that this was not a negotiable issue. We feel it is. That deserves further discussion.
“Then there are parts of our contract we feel were breached. They deserve further discussion.”
“You can see we still are in the discussion stage in all of this.”
