|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Leadership from the San Ramon Valley Education Association were joined by hundreds of community members for a virtual town hall discussion last week as the San Ramon Valley Unified School District proceeded with issuing pink slips to more than 100 educators represented by the union over the past month.
The district declared an impasse in bargaining with SRVEA in March, effectively halting negotiations with the teachers union – the only one of the bargaining units that district management did not ultimately negotiate an agreement with. But according to SRVEA leaders – who did not vote to join the district in their impasse declaration – the union was willing and able to continue negotiations with management, who they argue failed to address their concerns with the current layoffs and other budget cuts, or to consider alternative solutions.
Superintendent CJ Cammack, who was in attendance at the virtual town hall but did not speak, told DanvilleSanRamon that he disagreed with much of SRVEA’s characterization of the bargaining process and the possibility of avoiding or curbing the layoffs, emphasizing the “urgent need to make significant reductions in our budget” despite the impacts on students.
“We have engaged in a thoughtful and transparent process regarding our budget reduction plan,” Cammack said. “I recognize and respect that SRVEA does not want services reduced for students; nobody wants that outcome for our students. We all share a common agreement that these reductions will yield negative impacts for our students, our staff, and our community.”
Nonetheless, SRVEA leaders contend that district management failed to explore or consider options presented by the union during the bargaining process that sought to reduce impacts on students, with the goal of sharing their side of the story at last week’s town hall and counterpoints to Cammack’s characterization of the bargaining process in the impasse announcement last month.
“We are really trying to make sure that all of the facts are getting out, and that you have as much information as possible,” SRVEA Vice President Melinda Daly said at the March 25 town hall.
According to Cammack, the district shares that commitment to transparency and the union’s recognition of the potentially dire consequences of the cuts on students. He contended that the perspective shared by SRVEA leaders that evening did “not fully represent the objective facts,” although he did not elaborate on details.
“I remain committed to open and transparent communication and encourage everyone to check www.srvusd.net for information on our budget, negotiations, and newsletters,” Cammack said.
Major talking points in that evening’s presentation included an alleged overestimation of expenditures by the district, an early retirement plan proposed by SRVEA, a revenue enhancement plan the union had requested but that had allegedly not been prepared in time to help in the next school year, money spent on contractors as opposed to district employees, and cuts to management that SRVEA’s bargaining team had sought to see expanded.
“The last one on the list – here is something that we want to make sure everyone knows, and it’s not something that we take lightly,” Daly said. “I am a member of the bargaining team, and we felt that we were not getting anywhere in our negotiations to the point that we have filed an unfair practice charge against management because we did not feel that they were negotiating in good faith.”
That complaint was filed with the California Public Employment Relations Board on Feb. 19, and remains open as of Tuesday.
The move stems from the district’s continued commitment to the layoffs laid out in a $26 million budget cut package introduced by Cammack late last year and approved by the board of education earlier this year. SRVEA has sought to resist the layoffs at the bargaining table and outside, with rallies at school sites and pushback at school board meetings in the months since.
While the impasse declaration following the district’s seventh bargaining session with SRVEA on March 11 has allowed the district to proceed with those plans so far, SRVEA leaders said Tuesday that they were still seeking to undo some of those layoffs, which resulted in more than 120 pink slips to SRVEA represented employees and more than 50 to classified staff.
Although negotiations with the district have since broken down, SRVEA leaders pointed to one example that has been heartening to them, with the San Francisco Unified School District recently rescinding plans to layoff hundreds of teachers thanks to early retirement deals.
According to California Teachers Association representative Larry Spotts, an early retirement plan has been on the table for SRVEA since the beginning of negotiations, but was deterred by “excuses” from management.
“There is no such thing as an excuse that is acceptable,” Spotts said. “Every resource available needs to be used in order to protect our students. Since the beginning of negotiations, we have urged management to create a credible – and that’s a very key word – a credible early retirement plan to save money.”
“Management repeatedly refused to even discuss it, until management wanted to declare impasse and abandon negotiations,” he continued. “Then all of a sudden they approached negotiations with what could only be termed as an attempt to play a negotiations game.”
According to a summary of the seventh and – for now – final bargaining session with SRVEA from the district, management developed two potential plans for an early retirement deal: a “golden handshake” option and a “flat rate” option, but neither would yield the amount of savings necessary, according to the district.
“Ultimately, given the District’s current financial situation, it cannot agree to provide an incentive program that could cost the district more money than what is already allocated in the budget,” district officials wrote in the March 11 announcement. “Nor can the District agree to an MOU that uses proposed savings in any other way than to address achieving the budget reduction target of $13.7 million.”
“There was nothing credible about the plan that management presented at the table,” he continued. “In fact, they admitted they just didn’t have the time to create a credible plan, and this was six months into the school year, into the budget crisis that they were saying existed. Lo and behold, San Francisco Unified School District was going to lay off some 600 plus educators, but they didn’t make excuses – they made a difference for their students.”
Another major sticking point in negotiations between district management and SRVEA was the latter’s request to see more cuts at the managerial level. According to the results of a community survey that were produced by the district’s Budget Advisory Committee in December, spending on district administration was ranked as among the least impactful uses of funds, while maintaining class sizes and retaining teachers was ranked as a top priority.
“What’s really concerning is that the community spoke loud and clear in the budget advisory survey back in December that you wanted cuts to be kept far away from the classroom in order to protect students,” SRVEA bargaining chair Dee Dee Judice said. “It was our desire for management to give a little more when they saw how deeply these cuts in the SRVEA portion would hurt our students.”
“Unfortunately, that did not happen,” she continued. “For the past few years, we have had a working relationship with management and have been able to work together to problem solve for solutions to protect our students. This year, things have taken a different path, and we have been shut down immediately. We are continually looking at creative problem solving.”
Cuts to management approved in the budget reduction plan include reducing the superintendent’s work year by five days, reducing the work year of executive cabinet members, district administrator and staff by four days, and reducing the work year of school site administrators by three days – all amounting to $434,165 in one-time savings.
The remainder of the cuts to management consist of ongoing savings by eliminating the director of communications and family and community engagement for a savings of $266,472, eliminating a custodial supervisor for a savings of $170,915, eliminating three out of six educational services coordinators for $674,239 in savings, eliminating two directors in the education services department for $566,125 in savings, eliminating a project manager and a planning and development manager from the facilities department for $540,872 in savings, and eliminating a vacant special education program supervisor position for a savings of $200,299.
All in all, cuts to management in the approved budget reduction plan amount to more than $2.8 million of the $26 million budget reduction plan. SRVEA sought to double that amount during negotiations, but ultimately reached a disagreement with the district, who “unlawfully asserted that SRVEA has no legal right to propose this,” according to the union.
“The unwillingness of management to cut deeper in their section to protect our students has been disappointing,” Judice said.
According to data from SRVEA, spending by the district on administrator salaries has increased in the years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, now projected at approximately $22 million annually for the current school year – excluding the superintendent’s salary – compared with approximately $15.7 million in the 2018 to 2019 school year.
“If you look at this chart, you can see that there’s an awful lot of money going into a very small group of people during a budget deficit,” Judice said. “When student services are being cut and the amount is still increasing, is that really protecting our students? It was our hope that upper management would join the superintendent and freeze their salary increase as a way of standing in solidarity with us. Unfortunately, this was disregarded as not in our area of bargaining. Bargaining or not, that is what leaders do.”
While SRVUSD’s budget challenges have been widely discussed over the past year, particularly amid two efforts to pass a parcel tax measure – first in a May 2024 special election in which both a renewal measure and a supplementary measure failed to pass, then in November’s general election when the renewal Measure Q did ultimately pass – SRVEA leaders said that they estimate the management is over-projecting expenditures by approximately $6 million, particularly for consulting services.
However, there is currently no way of knowing that without management committing to make public monthly reports of actual encumbered expenses – another point of contention during bargaining, during which SRVEA had sought to get management to agree to provide the union such reports.
“SRVEA members have given hundreds of ideas for providing quality services to students in-house and not having to pay consulting or professional services outside of the district, but have consistently been rejected,” Daly said. “This is the result – we believe this $27.5 million projection is an overestimation of what will actually be spent. We won’t know until Sept. 15 of 2025.”
Although preliminary pink slips have already gone out to more than 120 employees represented by SRVEA, leaders said they were still holding out hope of reversing some of those cuts with the possibility of a discretionary block grant in the governor’s budget that teachers and community members had been lobbying for.
“If we’re able to do this and this money comes in, we will be able to save mental health supports in the district for next year, and then by that time, hopefully other revenue enhancement ideas would be kicking in,” Daly said. “It could be a bridge, which we have done before.”
“Unfortunately, we thought we were making progress,” she continued. “We thought we were going one way. We got turned around, and we’re told that this wasn’t going to happen unless we agreed to all of the other cuts, and that has not been our approach.”
A major source of contention between management and SRVEA during bargaining has been the latter’s refusal to agree to both the current layoffs as well as to ongoing cuts reducing funds for the union’s employees by $13.7 million annually for each of the next three years on top of the current round of cuts.
“The immediate challenge remains achieving at least $13.7 million in reductions from the SRVEA unit for each of the next three years,” district officials said in the March 11 announcement. “Despite seven negotiation sessions and approximately 12 proposals, the parties have not reached substantive progress on this critical issue.”
While the district is able to proceed with the current round of layoffs following the impasse declaration, the timeline for the impasse process is unclear, with several steps still to come.
“The District believes that engaging a third-party mediator is the most prudent course of action to facilitate movement toward a resolution,” district officials said on March 11. “As such, the District is declaring impasse and requesting that PERB appoint a mediator to assist both parties in reaching an agreement.”
The mediation process hinges on whether or not the PERB agrees with the district that the two sides have reached a true impasse.
“If PERB agrees that an impasse exists, the State Mediation and Conciliation Service of the Department of Industrial Relations is contacted to assign a mediator,” PERB officials said on their website.
If the two sides don’t reach a settlement during mediation, either party is then allowed to request the implementation of fact-finding measures, according to PERB, which provides lists of neutral fact-finders in such situations.
The union is also continuing to hold out hope that the board of education might begin to see their side of the equation with enough external pressure, despite having voted unanimously but reluctantly to the budget cut package and associated layoffs, with SRVEA encouraging its supporters to attend the next board of education meeting on April 22 to speak out against the layoffs and call for alternatives.
