[Editor’s Note: Here is the report the President of the Teachers Union sent to about 350 union members after last Thursday’s bargaining session with the Culver City School District management team.]
We were disappointed.
For months, we have been clear in our communications to the School Board that we would work with the District to get through this crisis, including agreeing to some furlough days — BUT THAT MANAGEMENT WOULD NEED TO LEAD THE WAY IN THIS PROCESS.
For example, teachers in Santa Monica have agreed to some furlough days, but management is taking more furlough days and their supe has agreed to take a reduction in some of those maddening perks that districts give to upper management.
(If you think our supe's $900 per month mileage allowance is too much, the supe in Santa Monica gets a housing allowance! )
We have suggested, for months, a long list of things that CCUSD management could cut so that librarians, music teachers, instructional aides and computer labs could be saved. Among them are:
Eliminate mileage allowances for administrators
Eliminate paid vacation days. (Teachers receive no paid vacation. We are paid only for the days we work.)
Reclassify some management positions to lower pay rates (for example, “Assistant Supe” reduced to “Director” level).
Reclassify some management positions to TOSA (Teacher on Special Assignment) status.
Rescind that “second raise” that has gone only to management employees every year since 2005 Reduce management's work year (12 months to 11 months; 11 months to 10 months).
Restructure Irving Place support services. Do managers need personal secretaries? Reduce consultant and legal fees. (CCUSD spends over $150,000 each year on outside lawyers.)
The management team's proposal last Thursday contained none of these concessions. They simply proposed that we take five furlough days next year and five furlough days the following year.
To add insult to injury, the management team did not respond to any of our other issues that we had proposed for this year's talks: Elementary prep time, evaluation procedures, stipends and restrictions on elementary combination classes, and the addition of state caseload maximums for specialists to our collective bargaining agreement.
We had anticipated that management would come to the table with movement on some of those issues as well as agreeing to some of the concessions listed above.
Instead, they simply proposed the five furlough days (for two years) and informed us that if we didn't take them, teachers could expect pink slips on March 15.
It appears as if their bargaining “strategy” is not to make any concessions but to threaten us with layoffs and the huge class sizes that would result. (The class size maximums in our contract are “soft” numbers, which can be overruled by the superintendent.)
The teams meet again this Thursday. Please don't hesitate to contact me by email at davidmielke@ccusd.org
