East Side Teachers Association/CTA/NEA 888 So. Capitol Ave San Jose, Ca 95127 October 13, 2005

Don McKell, President Ralph Giannini, Vice President and Interim Treasurer Jane Voss, Secretary

EstaPres@pacbell.net fax: (408) 272-7569 voice: (408) 272-0601 website: www.EastSideTA.org

A number of ESTA members began contacting me soon after the beginning of the school year with complaints about new work requirements being placed on SpEd Case Managers and Department Chairs. Rather than get the reports piecemeal, I asked all SpEd Dept Chairs and a few other folks to attend a meeting and share their concerns. The result of the meeting, held on Oct 4 at the Mt. Ham CTA office, was the production of a long list of new expectations that have been imposed by management on a significant segment of our members without consideration to the amount of time they might take to fully implement.

The list represents a classic case of a unilateral change in working conditions. To this point, we have identified 11 new requirements being placed on SpEd Department Chairs, and 17 new requirements being placed on SpEd Case managers, which were not a part of their job duties last year. As you might imagine, no commensurate duties were identified by management for removal.

Now that the list has been created, it is ESTA’s right and duty to notify the district of our Demand to Bargain the impact of the new requirements. Employees at all levels should naturally seek ways to work smarter, and if the law says we must do a thing, then we must do it. However, SpEd Department Chairs and Case Managers were already finding ways to fill their contractual day last year, prior to the imposition of this whole new set of job duties. If the district insists that these employees now take on additional duties, it is up to the district to either remove certain existing duties, or show us how we can get the new work done in the time allotted, or back off.

At least as troubling as the new set of job duties is the fact that the district made no mention of any proposed working conditions changes to ESTA when it sunshined its proposals for collective bargaining last spring. As a result, we believe that the unilateral imposition of new job duties with this timing constitutes an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP). Thus, in addition to issuing a Demand to Bargain the impact of the unilateral changes, we will also move forward with filing an ULP charge with the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).

ESTA members wishing to see the text of the Demand to Bargain letter, which includes the list of 28 new job duties for SpEd personnel, should contact me by email.

In the wake of the retirement of Launa Carlson last June, our Bargaining Team was down to four members. Starting in March of last year, we began a process to recruit and train potential new Team members. The process was culminated at the October 5 meeting of the ESTA Assembly when that body unanimously approved the recommendation to appoint Theresa Flores (ST) and Rob Suhr (Pegasus) to join the Team.

Like all CTA chapters, ESTA operates under a set of explicit bylaws that dictate much of our activities, duties, and organization. Any member can request a copy of our bylaws at any time.

As set forth in our bylaws, ESTA members elect four Executive officers every other year to serve two year terms. Thus, next spring, we will elect a President, Vice President, General Secretary, and Treasurer to serve beginning September 1, 2006. Our bylaws wisely limit any individual to a maximum of four consecutive full terms in any particular Executive Officer position.

At present, these officers are: Don McKell (President), Ralph Giannini (Vice President), and Jane Voss (Secretary). Our former Treasurer resigned from the district last June and we will hold an election to choose his successor on November 16. In the mean time, former Treasurer Ralph Giannini has graciously agreed to serve as our Interim.

Beyond the four Executive Officers, our bylaws call for the election of an individual Site President and Vice President at each school and at the District Office. These local officers serve one-year terms, from January 1 through December 31, and have no term limits. At present, these Site Presidents are: Wendy Stegeman (AH), Penny Kelley (DO), Marisa Vera (EV), Janice Mallard (FH), Dee Medberry (IH), Mike Gatenby (JL), Bob Rumph (MP), Kim Schaupp (OG), Paul Landshof (PH), Larry Johnson (SC), Theresa Flores (ST), Eleanor Aguirre (WO), and Blanca Espinosa (YB).

All policy and financial decisions made in ESTA are in the domain of the ESTA Assembly. This Assembly is composed of the four Executive Officers, the Site Presidents and Vice Presidents, and Site representatives elected for staggered two-year terms from each school on a ratio of 1 rep for each 40 ESTA members or major fraction thereof. When everyone shows up, there are 60 delegates at Assembly meetings.

ESTA is currently seeking nominations and declarations of candidacy for Site Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Assembly Representatives. The submission deadline is 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 2. The election is set for Wednesday, November 16.

The ESTA Assembly has a regular meeting once each month. Future meeting dates are: Nov 2, Nov 30, Jan 4, Feb 1, Mar 8, Apr 5, May 3, and May 31. Any ESTA member can attend Assembly meetings.

Another important formal body in ESTA is the ESTA Executive Board. This group is composed of the four Executive Officers, the twelve Site Presidents, our CTA State Council delegates, Chairs of Standing Committees and members of the Bargaining Team. The E-Board generally meets two weeks before the Assembly. Its role is to make proposals for consideration of the Assembly and to direct bargaining, and occasionally to beat up the President.

As most classroom teachers are painfully aware, class counts are extraordinarily high this year. As part of an effort to trim the budget, our school board invoked a portion of the contract which did away with the limits to class sizes listed in Article 15, citing "exceptional circumstances". I signed an agreement stating that ESTA would not file a grievance to dispute the existence of exceptional circumstances, if the district agreed to pack classes with no more than three students.

Left in place was the contract language providing class size overage payments to teachers at a rate of $1 per day per student over the original Article 15.1 departmental limits. At the end of the fifth week of school, ESTA members had accumulated approximately $166,000 worth of overage payments. The table below summarizes some pertinent statistics regarding class size overage payments through the fifth week of school.

The "average" teacher qualifying for payments accrued just under $200 since August 23. Extrapolated over the entire first semester, this suggests that packing extra students into classes will provide around $700 to the "average" teacher and cost the district around $600,000 by Jan 13. By contrast, the school board adopted a budget for this year that included an estimate of around $3m in savings resulting from the class size increases.

As far as I could, I collected the names of every ESTA member who left the district at the end of last school year. Some retired, some resigned, and some were not rehired. The total was exactly 100. Two days before school opened this year, ESTA Vice President Ralph Giannini and I spoke to a group of the district’s most recently hired certificated employees. There were 102 of them. Since then, a few more have been hired.

The point is: the district does not have fewer ESTA members this year than it did last year. The numbers are roughly the same. Granted, the district’s overall payroll costs may be measurably lower this year than last because the newer employees are probably, on average, lower on the salary schedule than the people they are replacing.

And yet, the majority of our classes are bursting at the seams with students. If we were to reduce all classes to their Article 15 maximums and open new sections to accommodate the surplus students, the district would need to hire a bunch more teachers. How many? No one seems to know (which is a curious thing all by itself). But my best guess is that it would take between 30 and 40 new FTE to balance classes. If so, it could be argued that our bursting classrooms are saving the district around $2.5m in payroll and related expenditures this fiscal year.

No one can know what the costs, measured in terms of teacher burnout, lowered morale, and the degradation to student learning, will be by the time this plays out. But we all know those costs will be significant.

We can also be pretty sure that class sizes will revert back to their "normal" levels next year. So if you know any aspiring teachers who will be looking for jobs next summer, tell them East Side will be hiring. Big time.

We’ve all just got done filling out our CBEDS forms, providing all sorts of data to the bean counters in Sacto to manipulate. CBEDS day is chosen statewide as a benchmark for lots of statistics, some of which may be of interest to us. For instance, one year ago, East Side’s CBEDS enrollment was 24,656 students. This year, it was 25,031 students, for an increase of 375 students in one year’s time. Last year, the Base Revenue Limit (BRL) per student was $5,593, and so if all students had come to school every day, our district would have earned about $137.6m in BRL (general fund) dollars.

This year, our 5.58% COLA raised the BRL to $5,905. If all students have perfect attendance, our district will earn about $146.3m in BRL money.

Of course, not all students come to school every day. Last year, East Side had slightly over 95% attendance. If we make the same mark this year, and factoring in all of the numbers above, our district stands to have at its disposal about $8.3m more in revenue this year than last year. Add to that the estimated $2.5m savings from our burgeoning classes, and what emerges is a district with at least $10.8 million more disposable cash.

Accounting documents filed with the state shows that district expenses last year amounted to $2.3m more than revenue. That sort of deficit spending is not healthy; it’s one reason why East Side finances showed up so regularly in the Murky News last year. In contrast, the budget adopted by our school board last June projects this year’s revenue of $207.9m to exceed expenses of $205.8m by $2.1m. If true, we’ll see a swing of $4.4m in the right direction.

There’s a catch. After resisting the notion for months, the district finally did exactly what ESTA had taken it to court last winter to accomplish. This year’s district budget includes a $4m infusion of money from the sale of investment property known as the Quimby land sales proceeds. There’s enough money left in that fund for a similar infusion of budget-balancing cash for two more years, and then it’s all gone. This manna from heaven should provide the district with a cushion to augment its budget two more times. Let us hope that this soft landing will leave us at a point where we have figured out a way that we can get along without it.

Passage of Prop 76 will be devastating to every school district budget in the state, ours included. On the contrary, failure of Prop 76 will preserve the terms of the old Prop 98, which have gradually ratcheted up district revenues since its passage many years ago. If we continue to see BRL income rise over the next few years, and if we’re not too greedy at the bargaining table, we just might get through these harrowing times.