ESTA UPDATE

SICK LEAVE BANK

ESTA’s Sick Leave Bank is entering its third year of operation in 04/05. To date, just under 100 days of sick leave has been provided to participating members in instances where prolonged illnesses have exhausted the members’ own person supply of sick leave.

By state law, each certificated employee is advanced ten sick leave days at the beginning of each school year. A teacher with a legitimate illness-related absence gets full pay as long as s/he has sick leave days stored up. Any days not used in one particular year accumulate into a personal account that accrues for a person’s entire public education career. It is the District’s responsibility to maintain records of our sick leave balance. By staying healthy and carefully managing one’s absences, many teachers retire with a hundred or more unused sick days; under a law promoted by CTA, such unused days now convert to extra income in retirement.

Other teachers aren’t so fortunate. Especially in the first few years of a teacher’s career when unused sick leave balances may be small, a catastrophic illness can exhaust the supply, causing a drastic decrease in one’s income at a time when we may be the most vulnerable. If a teacher is still too ill to return to work after depleting all sick leave, the District will subtract the cost of a long-term substitute from the teacher’s daily pay. This is known as “differential pay” and can go on for up to 100 work days. (Things get really bleak after that.)

The ESTA Sick Leave Bank provides a buffer between exhausting all sick leave and going on differential pay. However, like any other insurance program, it is not without cost to participants. In order to be eligible to apply to withdraw days from the Sick leave Bank, an individual must first donate at least one sick leave day to the Bank. A participant becomes fully vested in the SLB program after donating a second sick day (at the beginning of the second year of participation). Once vested, participants will only be required to donate more days if the balance in the Bank falls to below 50 days.

Right now, all ESTA members fall into one of three categories with respect to the Sick Leave Bank.

Members who are not participants because they have never begun the process to donate a sick day. We hope many of these folks join the Bank this year. To do so, they must submit the form before the end of September.

‚ Members who began participating last year, who can either opt out or donate a second sick day this year to become vested. There are 162 folks in this category

ƒ Members who began participating two years ago, who are now vested because they have donated two sick days. There are 150 folks in this category.

People join the Sick Leave Bank for various reasons. The most altruistic reason may be to help other people in need. A second reason is to buy a little bit of security by positioning oneself to be able to apply for a “gift” of sick leave in the event of a catastrophic illness. If you want to join up, you must do so before September 30.

2004/05 SALARY SCHEDULE

In the 2003/04 school year, the per-pupil funding from the state to this district was approximately $5,385. (This is the so-called Base Revenue Limit, or BRL.) In the state budget signed into law this past summer, per-pupil funding will rise to about $5,600. Several factors combine to bring about the increase of $215, including the statutory Cost Of Living Allowance from a formula in Prop 98, a deficit reduction piece, and so-called equalization aid. Our contract defines whatever the percent annual increase is as “COLA”, and states that all pay categories for our Bargaining Unit Members will be increased by that percentage. The $215/student BRL increase amounts to a 3.99% raise. Given below is the salary schedule that should be adopted by the district this year. It includes a 3.99% raise from last year. Superintendent Zendejas has assured us that the District will honor the contract in this matter.

Step	BA A	BA+30 B	BA+45 C	60 w/MA 65w/oMA D
1	42,793	43,403	44,015	45,238
2	42,794	44,015	44,626	45,848
3	42,794	44,626	45,238	51,135
4	43,403	48,599	51,233	53,868
5	48,697	51,332	53,966	56,601
6	51,430	54,065	56,699	59,334
7	54,163	56,798	59,432	62,067
8	56,896	59,531	62,166	64,801
9	59,629	62,264	64,899	67,533
10	62,362	64,997	67,632	70,266
11	65,095	67,730	70,365	73,000
12	67,829	70,463	73,097	75,733
16			75,294	77,929
20			77,489	80,124
24			79,684	82,319
28			81,879	84,514
32			84,076	86,711

	Master's:	1,467
	Doctorate:	1,956

All other pay (coaching, extra period, workshop, extra duty stipends, and so forth) for work performed since July 1 should reflect the 3.99% increase. (An exception is 2004 summer school pay, which is always paid at the rate in effect at the beginning of instruction.)

Those of us who are in line for a September 10 payout may not see the increase at that time, owing to the data entry workload at the beginning of the year on the Personnel and Business Departments. Be patient: retro checks are nice to get.

TRAVEL TO JAPAN

I was recently made aware of a terrific opportunity available to up to 600 teachers in the United States. Would you like to have an all-expenses-paid, three week cultural experience in Japan, in either June, October, or November 2006? Read on.

The Institute of International Education is offering a Fulbright Memorial Fund grant sufficient to plan and pay nearly the entire costs of such a venture to educators. Just about the only restrictions are that participants:

Be employed full-time as teachers or administrators at primary or secondary levels (grades 1–12);

‚ Reside in one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia;
ƒ Be a U.S. citizen at the time of application;

Additionally, the Fulbright Fund will not pay for the costs of a substitute, but the literature suggests that many school districts agree to release teachers who are selected for this prestigious cultural experience. The deadline for applying for the June, 2006, trip is December 10. Visit the IIE website (www.iie.org) for more information. It’s a very “busy” website, and you’ll have to be patient as you navigate to find details on this particular program. Maybe the easiest way is to select the “Program Search” link near the lower left on the IIE home page, and enter “Japan” as a keyword search. Then, select “Fulbright Memorial Fund Teacher Program (FMF)” from the resultant list.

ADVISORS

At its August 26 meeting, the East Side School Board approved a revised Job Description for the position of Student Advisor. This simple act put an end to the often tortured path we went down last year, all of whose twists and turns arose from a series of credentialing issues, sprinkled with a supply of lawyers, stubborn people, and a basic lack of communication. If you want the blow-by-blow recap of the whole thing, invite me out for a beer sometime.

Suffice it to say that within days of his arrival on the scene, new HR Chief Bob Nunez had cut through the clutter and arranged a meeting in Sacramento that proved to be the breakthrough we had been looking for.

All of last year’s Student Advisors who weathered the storm are back in the saddle at their jobs again this year, slated to do pretty much what Advisors been doing for 30 years or more. What’s more, they don’t need administrative credentials and they get to remain in our bargaining unit.

In the thick of the debacle, when it appeared as if there would be no peaceful resolution, ESTA had begun to battle the district on three different fronts: we were poised to take the matter to a grievance arbitration, we had filed documents alleging that the district was perpetrating an Unfair Labor Practice, and we were set to go to Superior Court with allegations of the District’s wanton disregard for public safety.

Thankfully, all those issues can now be disposed of as we move forward into a school year that will still have more than its share of disagreements and grievances. (See the next article on Class Size).

CLASS SIZE

Also occurring at the 8/26 Board meeting: the School Board quietly and without comment rescinded an action it took last spring. On April 8, the Board had passed a resolution declaring that “exceptional circumstances” existed that were sufficient, in its opinion, to invoke Article 15.4 of the contract. That paragraph states:

“The Board of Trustees, following prior notification and consultation of the Exclusive Representative, reserves the right to exceed maximums listed in section 15.1 under exceptional circumstances.”

ESTA could see no clear examples of the “exceptional circumstances” needed by the District to waive the class size numbers under the contract. As a consequence, we filed a grievance over the action and were prepared to take whatever other ethical steps were necessary to preserve the best possible educational environment. Among our behaviors were intensive discussions with DO officials and school board members about the dire results in store for the District if it were to lose an arbitration on this issue.

Something somebody said must have hit the proper key, because we got a written agreement from the District in mid-summer that it would un-invoke (or whatever the proper word is) the 15.4 claim at the first available meeting of the Board.

But of course, some pretty drastic damage has already been done. It appears as if the APEDs were given the green light to load classes at whatever student levels they wanted as they ran their master schedule software to generate teacher and student class assignments for this semester. There were stories aplenty of first day classes with 40 (or 50) students present, and dozens of other nasty surprises.

On the flip side, there were also a reported 1,500 district-wide student no-shows on day 1, and in keeping with past tradition those students were summarily dropped from the data base. Now that the Board has re-established the historic class size limits under section 15.1 of the contract, we can only hope that class size balancing and master schedule adjusting have already begun to take place, even as the missing 1,500 students slowly trickle back. Under the contract, the District has until the 17^th day of school (this year: Sept 16) to have made every effort to bring classes to within limits.

ESTA will work with and watch the District closely to see that teachers and students are not unnecessarily harmed by this ill-timed excursion into “exceptional circumstance” fantasyland.

WAIVERS

This is the time of year that teachers can expect to be approached by administration with requests that we sign class size waivers. I urge all ESTA members to think very carefully before signing any waivers. We have fought long and hard to reduce our class sizes to the levels we have currently negotiated in the contract, and it is a rare instance that either teachers or students benefit by being put into situations of larger classes. Signing a class size waiver allows the District to leave that particular class out of its contractual obligation to reduce the numbers of students. In addition, the teacher who signs a waiver gives up any claim s/he will have to the “dollar a day” class size overage payments. If you’re a new teacher or you’re unsure about signing, take the time to talk with your more experienced colleagues before you sign that waiver.

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Register to Vote on November 2

by October 13