Re “Hamme Explains How It All Began”
As the Union vs. El Marino Parents controversy percolates this morning into a new month, the woman at the center, Debbie Hamme, President of the Assn. of Classified Employees, returned to re-address the Question of the Week:
As the longtime leader of the labor group hoping to unionize 20 language specialists in El Marino Language School’s 26-year-old immersion programs, when did Ms. Hamme first learn that a school booster club was funding the aides?
“I don’t know that I can put a specific date on it,” Ms. Hamme told the newspaper. “For the last couple of years, I have been aware that ALLEM (Advocates of Learning Language, El Marino) is the booster club for El Marino.”
Question: Were you aware of any more than that, that ALLEM was funding adjuncts, as the language aides are known?
“No. I didn’t know what adjuncts were. That was a term I had heard before. I didn’t realize they were classroom aides.
“In our last interview, I was trying to convey that the adjuncts are not strictly modeling language in the classroom.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t know the scope of this program. I didn’t know how many people they employed. I didn’t know what the people were doing until the Lin Howe issue (when Lin Howe School attempted a similar program at the beginning of the present school year).
“I thought ALLEM was a more traditional booster club where they were providing educational materials for the classroom, that type of thing, not that they were paying for personnel.”
How did you learn of the personnel mattere?
“I became aware of what was happening at El Marino through my conversations with Mrs. (Leslie) Lockhart (School District Human Resources Director) about the Lin Howe booster club. I learned about what Lin Howe was doing through a story last September or October in the culvercitypatch.com, that Lin Howe was hiring adjuncts for their classrooms.
“I called Mrs. Lockhart then to confirm this indeed was happening. She called Amy Anderson, the Principal of Lin Howe, and then we all started talking about how we could do this the right way.”
As President of ACE, did your talks with Lin Howe go smoothly and quickly?
“Yes, over a period of a few weeks.”
Was there any resistance from Lin Howe over unionizing the aides?
“Not really. They did say this to me, though, that they wanted to make sure El Marino’s adjuncts would go through the same (unionization) process all the other schools had to. When the President of the Lin Howe booster club (Paul Walsleben) told me ‘there are adjuncts at El Marino,’ that was pretty much my first specific awareness that there were people being paid by another booster club.
“His comment to me prompted a phone call to Mrs. Lockhart, asking for more information about what the program at El Marino looked like. I had heard the term ‘adjunct’ used in connection with El Marino, but I was under the impression they were District employees. I didn’t know who paid them, whether they were employed through the District.
“As I have said, Farragut School gives money from their booster club to the District to pay their computer lab technicians. Lin Howe gives money from their booster club to the District to pay for their instructional assistants. The only school that isn’t doing that, which I just found out, is El Marino’s ALLEM.
“I didn’t realize they were a stand-alone employer. I didn’t realize that they had their own payroll service. I didn’t know any of that.”
Ms. Hamme may be contacted at antiquer01@aol.com
