Mar 25, 2018 - With new state money in play, now is the time to light a fire under the District and insure that the need
Bargaining Update #14
March 25, 2018
Bargaining Chips SOLIDARITY NOW WILL WIN THE CONTRACT OUR STUDENTS DESERVE! Your Bargaining Team is preparing for tomorrow’s joint OEA-OUSD Bargaining Session, ready to continue the fight for a fair contract that puts District resources where they belong, in the classroom. Shoring up our resolve with our week-long (March 26-29) Work to Contract campaign, we need to take that fight into our schools and communities, with a resounding show of Union solidarity. WHY WORK TO CONTRACT? The District Bargaining Team has failed repeatedly to negotiate, arriving ill-prepared to sessions, seemingly lacking the vision, insight, initiative, or professionalism to settle this contract. For 16 months! District spin doctors, initially seeking to deflect the egregious lack of institutional oversight as District coffers were rifled by the Bank of Antwan, continue to plead poverty despite rosier revenue projections over the coming year. The latest John Sasaki missive paternalistically lectured us on our responsibilities across our duty day during Work to Contract, and disingenuously contrasted our pay to other Alameda County Districts in “OUSD Fast Facts, Volume 1: Compensation”. In our Sunshine proposals shared before the School Board last Spring, both teams echoed the vision of our Local Control and Accountability Plan. OUSD LCAP Priority 1: Effective Talent Programs: Our work starts with our people. We need to make OUSD the premier employer for educators in the Bay Area. To have any chance of recruiting and retaining the highest quality educators we must compete with neighboring Districts. Our last successor agreement helped inch us forward, but we have a long ways to go. We were at the bottom in salary 5 years ago and are still near the bottom, sinking lower as other Districts provide raises to their employees. Focusing on percentage increases and neglecting to reference actual salaries across Alameda County is completely misleading. Here’s the full picture: The real story on OUSD spending priorities Where are we with proposals in three key areas? (See link below to our specific proposals. Most District proposals are missing. The District requested permission to copy our open link, added some of their proposals, and then didn’t provide permission to view.) Article 10: Hours of Work. OEA proposal of November 6, 2017 (P-29) was extensive, streamlining extra-duty responsibilities and defining compensation for work outside the duty day. OUSD proposal three months later (February 12, 2018: P-32) ignored the extensive visionary OEA work, even preserving obsolete language, and pushed to expand the range of start and end times for the school day, ostensibly to support never substantiated savings on bus transportation. DISTRICT IS UNRESPONSIVE AND ILLOGICAL.
Article 15: Class Size. OEA proposal of May 4, 2017 (P-18), maintained on October 23, 2017 (P-27), advanced our vision shared by the community of across the board class size reductions with particular attention to our most vulnerable student populations: Newcomers, Special Education students, and those attending schools with high numbers of English Learners, those eligible for free or reduced lunch, and foster youth (unduplicated public percentage). We also provided compensatory disincentives to discourage exceeding class size maximums and forming combo classes at elementary and multiple prep classes at secondary. Apart from a brief attempt to turn back the clock on Special Education caseload reductions for 2017-18 through a new MOU (rejected by OEA), the lackluster OUSD proposal waited 10 months until March 19, 2018 (P-36). They proposed raising SDC class size maximums without any additional supports built into the contract (including teacher compensation for overages), and countered our $30 a day per student at elementary, $6/$10 per secondary period or block with a compensation proposal $9/$1.75/$2 that would be less than the amount most teachers receive per classroom student. This would be an incentive for contract violation. DISTRICT CONTINUES TO DEVALUE CLASSROOM NEEDS, ESPECIALLY FOR OUR MOST VULNERABLE STUDENTS. Article 21: Specialized Services and Specialized Assignments. OEA introduced an extensive proposal with the assistance of 9 subject-matter experts who provided telling testimony to the need for contract revision at the morning and afternoon sessions. Focus was on shifting resources from itinerant contract employees to unit members through caseload reductions to reflect the ongoing demand for supporting diverse student needs through counseling, nursing, psychological, and speech services. We also worked to define the evolving role of “Inclusion Specialists” especially in relation to their collaboration with general education classroom teachers. Last, but not least, we continued our efforts to be inclusive of Substitute Teachers, an integral part of any District. To their credit, the District proposal of March 19, 2018 (P-36) included arguably their first attempt at a creative solution to a perplexing problem: the impact of increasing numbers of SDC students being included in general education classrooms. Their Inclusive Practices: language will be revisited at the March 26, 2018 Bargaining Session, but only in the context of securing caseload protections, provision of key resources, and a recognition of the demands that expanded Inclusion places upon the general ed classroom. At the same time as agreeing to our proposed language about the centrality of Substitute Teachers and their need to be supplied with keys as a basic health and safety concern, they proposed withholding assignments until a substitute return or pay for missing keys. Our jaws dropped! “Bad optics,” the District chairperson eventually recognized. YES! DISTRICT IS LARGELY UNRESPONSIVE, WITH CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM FOR WORKING TOGETHER AROUND INCLUSION ISSUES. Article 24: Compensation OEA introduced a nuanced proposal on November 6, 2017 (P-28), endeavoring to bring our salaries up to the Alameda County median, and recruit and retain educators by offering uniform step and column increases. As is, the salary schedule provides little incentive not to leave Oakland when an educator falls further behind other Districts after just a few years of teaching. Our initial proposal represented an over 16% aggregate salary increase for the bargaining unit. More than four months later, the District has yet to provide a comprehensive compensation proposal. Instead of a comprehensive proposal in January, they asked us to consider an unpaid furlough day, giving up our one day end of year teacher work day. Instead of a comprehensive proposal in March, they trotted out a half-baked Measure G1 proposal that proposed delaying parcel tax funds available for distribution starting July 1, until the following May! WHEN NOT UNRESPONSIVE DISTRICT HAS BEEN FRANKLY INSULTING!.
DO WE NEED ANY MORE REASONS TO WORK TO CONTRACT!?! With new state money in play, now is the time to light a fire under the District and insure that the needs of the classroom are the priorities in budgeting for 2018-19. Where will new and redistributed moneys go? To consultants? To half-baked District initiatives? To freshly-bloated administration? Or to the classroom, with class size and caseloads reductions, especially for our most vulnerable students, comparable compensation for Oakland teachers in relation to neighboring districts, and a contractually protected duty day?
Your Bargaining Team needs an increase of pressure on the school board! It begins tomorrow with other actions planned for April.
Follow the actual written proposals in the tracking document here.
BARGAINING TEAM MEETINGS: Your OEA Bargaining Team will be meeting every week until we reach agreement. We will continue to schedule time with constituent groups and subject-matter experts between 5 and 6 on the days we meet. Meetings will be from 4:30-7:30 each Tuesday. 2018 Dates: March 26th, April 16th, April 23rd, April 30th
YOUR OEA BARGAINING TEAM: Dennis Nelson, Chair, Home Instruction, PEC Lusa Lai, Second Grade, Lincoln Mark Fisher, Second Grade, Fruitvale Doug Appel, CTA Staff, Emeritus
Katherine Gibson, TK, Greenleaf TK-8 Patricia Segura, Newcomer TSA, Fremont High Amy Dellefield, Social Studies/Sports Coach, Oakland High Trish Gorham, ex officio member, OEA President
