East Side Teachers Association/CTA/NEA 888 So. Capitol Ave San Jose, Ca 95127 October 28, 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

After a series of mutually agreed-to delays, the school board finally brought the issue of whether to approve the charter petition from Andrew Hill to a vote at its Oct 20 meeting. Only hours before the meeting, the District had distributed the findings of its attorney as to the adequacy of the charter petition. The timing of the release of the 21 page document virtually eliminated any chance of the AH Charter Board to give anything but a cursory rebuttal to the multitude of issues raised. After the report had been summarized by the attorney during the board meeting, the school board voted 4-0 to accept Interim Superintendent Bob Nunez’s recommendation to deny the charter. Board member George Shirakawa was absent from the meeting and did not vote.

For nearly a year, a large group of faculty members at AHHS have worked towards the goal of becoming the Andrew Hill Charter High School (AHCHS), a Dependent conversion charter school. In theory, as a dependent charter school, AH certificated staff would continue to be ESTA members and work under the terms of the ESTA contract except for where the AHCHS faculty agreed to local changes. The site could gain a large degree of autonomy, but would remain a part of the ESUHSD, drawing upon certain District resources.

It is not clear to me exactly which "friction points" might develop after several years of operation as a Charter, but I am a committed convert to Murphy’s Law and continue to have misgivings about the venture. Among the more significant unknowns I have are the processes for prosecuting member grievances that might not be resolved at the local AHCHS level, and the potential for a gradual divergence from a uniform salary schedule or work hours covering all ESTA members.

I have not taken a stand either for or against the proposal, largely because it is my duty to fairly represent all ESTA members, including those who have strong convictions on each side of the matter. No significant debate on the charter has been held in the ESTA Assembly, and that body has likewise taken no position.

I am told that the AH charter petition will now be revised in an attempt to accommodate the concerns raised in its recent iteration, and then resubmitted to the East Side board for renewed consideration. That resubmission will drop the flag on a new 60-day time period for approval or denial by the board. As is always the case under charter school law, denial of a charter by a local school board allows the petitioners to bring their issue first to the County, and then to the State, seeking approval.

The AHCHS petitioners have chosen, at least in this round, to rework their petition for resubmission to our local school board rather than take it immediately to another level of government.

Visit www.andrewhillcharter.org to view the original petition. The attorney’s 21-page analysis of it is not available online, but I can email it to you by request.

The deadline for declaring candidacy in the Nov 16 election is fast approaching. Persons wishing to be on the ballot for election to ESTA Treasurer, ESTA Site President or Vice President, ESTA Local Grievance Rep, or ESTA Assembly Rep must submit their nomination forms to me by 5:00 p.m. on November 2.

Contact me or your Site President to obtain the proper forms.

If you are an ESTA member at any of the SBNs, or the EVCC site of the Biotech Academy, or other location without a local Site President, you will automatically be sent all necessary materials for voting by mail. Any other person wishing to vote by mail should contact me. The deadline for applying to vote by mail in the November election is November 9.

The election will be held at all sites on Wednesday, November 16.

In keeping with the solid front of the Alliance for a Better California, the East Side School Board unanimously voted at its October 20 meeting to oppose passage of Propositions 74, 75, and 76 in the November special election. The California Association of School Boards (CSBA) is a member of the Alliance, along with a broad coalition of educational and public service organizations.

It’s crunch time. Recent statewide polls suggest that the outcome of the special election on propositions 74, 75, and 76 is too close to call. ESTA and the other seven Mt. Hamilton CTA chapters continue to make calls each afternoon from 4:00 p.m. until around 8:00 p.m. out of the Mt. Ham office, and we continue to urge our members to join with other Alliance volunteers in weekend precinct walking coordinated out of the office of the South Bay Labor Council.

Many people who would likely vote to defeat Props 74, 75, and 76 are planning "not to dignify" the costly and unnecessary special election by staying away from the polls. While understandable, this strategy will probably backfire, inasmuch as the lead proposition on the ballot is a hot-button issue and will likely galvanize conservative voters to participate. Neither ESTA nor CTA has any position on Prop 73, but we see it as a magnet to draw voters to the polls who have not been historically sympathetic to union issues. Our calls and precinct walks are designed to convince the fence sitters that we all need to turn out in this election.

The calling is low key, with no argumentative incidents. We need to fill 20 phones each evening between now and the election, as well as daytime Get Out The Vote calls on Saturday and Sunday, November 5 and 6. Just show up at Mt. Ham and stay as long as you can.

CTA and ESTA are once again announcing three separate scholarship programs of interest to members.

 CTA 2006 Scholarship for Members. Five $2,000 scholarships will be awarded to CTA Members enrolled in a credentialing or degree program who show a potential for successful use of the funds.

‚ CTA 2006 Scholarship for Dependent Children. Twenty-five $2,000 scholarships will be awarded to a dependent of an active, retired, or deceased CTA member. The dependent must plan to attend an insti-tution of higher learning for a degree or credential

ƒ ESTA 2006 Scholarship for Children and Grand-children of Members. Funds totaling about $6,000 will be awarded in furtherance of higher education to either high school seniors or current college students.

Complete details and official application forms are available from Lori or Ly at the Mt. Hamilton office by calling 272-0601. (The CTA forms are also available online at www.cta.org) The application forms will take some time to fill out, so don’t wait too long to get started. Completed CTA forms must be postmarked by January 27, 2006. The deadline for submission of the ESTA forms is March 3, 2006.

The resignation of the former principal at Independence set off a series of events that eventually led to the announcement of a string of leadership changes in the District. In a short space of time, Interim Superintendent Bob Nunez disclosed that   temporary IHS principal Carol Blackerby would transfer to OG, ‚  JL principal Bill Rice would be transferred to Independence,

ƒ  OG administrator Rich Frias would move to JL, „  OG principal Gerri Forte would transfer to the DO.

There was a certain logic to those moves, but a few were not without controversy. In particular, the loss of Bill Rice was so upsetting to virtually the entire James Lick community that a grass roots protest movement was spawned which eventually put the brakes to that portion of the plan. Bob Nunez is to be commended for having the leadership qualities to take a step back from an otherwise logical plan to consider the human impact. The greatest needs that year-3 SAIT school JL has right now is stability and confidence. Attaboy, Bob.

I get asked that question a lot lately, and my answer is starting to sound more and more evasive, even to me. And that bothers me not a little bit.

Our Bargaining Unit Members are now working on an expired contract; the previous agreement having timed out last August 31. A section in that old agreement rolls all of the language over until a new contract has been ratified or enforced, so there’s no immediate danger of rampant chaos breaking out anytime soon (aside from the "normal" levels to which we’ve become accustomed in the past couple of years).

By law, no educational Collective Bargaining Agreement can last longer than three years, so periodic renegotiation of our contract is nothing unusual. More often than not in the past twenty years or so, we have reached Tentative Agreement on a successor contract before dismissal of school in June. My recollection is that we’ve opened school without a contract only two or three times in that time span, and that those occurrences were characterized by a certain amount of, shall we say, unrest on our part.

So what’s different now? Well, first off, we all got beaten up pretty badly last year with a barrage of wildly fluctuating news citing the imminent financial collapse of the District. There was just enough truth in those ‘the sky is falling’ tales to give pause to prudent people, and since a goodly portion of our contract proposal to the District could have a financial impact, we wanted to be sure that we had as accurate a picture of District finances as we could before pressing too hard.

Next, getting out from under our former superintendent caused a certain giddiness among some of us, and also contributed to the feeling that we might want to let the leadership situation in the District reach some measure of equilibrium before we began bargaining the tough stuff.

Third, we all hoped that the release of the district’s Unaudited Actuals from the 2004/05 fiscal year would at last give us a clear picture of the true extent of District finances for last year. These documents are not generally available until mid-September. When we finally got our copies, they were not in a format that was particularly useful, and it took another couple of weeks to get them in the so-called SACS format. We inspected the figures with as much scrutiny as we could, and generated a two-page list of questions for clarification on certain issues. We are still waiting for the District response.

Lastly, there has been the matter of the energy we are pouring into the governor’s special election. ESTA leadership did not feel comfortable embarking on that venture while simultaneously becoming more demon-strative in our feelings of unrest over lack of progress in bargaining.

Which is not to say that no progress has been made. The negotiators from both sides have met a score of times since last March, and are working their way through many of the non-money issues that need to be bargained. Significant progress has been made in that area, and a number of thorny issues have been TA’d.

The last time the two teams met, it was ESTA’s expectation that we would finally get down to issues of high finance. Alas, the District’s Chief Negotiator abruptly left the meeting, presumably to attend to some other pressing matter, and no such discussion was begun. So we wait. But how long we wait is problematic. When the sun comes up on November 9 – the day after the ill-advised special election – we will no longer have the distraction of those problematic propositions to deal with. ESTA’s Executive Board has a regular meeting scheduled for November 16, and I strongly suspect that the E-Board will want to hear some reports from the Negotiators about progress in bargaining by that time.

We have never worked as hard as we are working now. We are beset by a do-nothing puppet Congress, a hostile governor, far more time-consuming paperwork being demanded than ever before, hugely draining class sizes, and a district that has to send DO staff to each school in mid-October to count certificated noses because it lacks confidence in its own employee database.

Let’s not forget the price of housing, food, gasoline, and everything else under the sun.

What’s wrong with this picture? Imagine how much more energy we could bring to the job if it were not for these distractions.