East Side Teachers Association/CTA/NEA 888 So. Capitol Ave San Jose, Ca 95127 April 6, 2006

Don McKell, President Ralph Giannini, Vice President Jane Voss, Secretary Bernadette Salgarino, Treasurer

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

Each member of our Bargaining Team (currently: Don Dawson, Kim Schaupp, Julie Pratico, Marisa Vera, Theresa Flores, and Rob Suhr) gets an annual stipend approved in our yearly budget by the ESTA Assembly. In addition, it has been our practice for many years to provide a "bonus" to our Negotiators in the wake of a successful ratification of a successor agreement, in partial recognition of the massive amount of time and talent it takes to bring in a new contract in bargaining years. The ESTA Assembly approved a motion at its March 8 meeting to award contract-ratification amounts of $3,000 to the Bargaining Chair (Dawson) and $2,000 for the remaining Team members.

I have already reported that the District admits to having made some pretty significant errors in the amounts that were calculated for first semester class size overage payments for PE teachers earlier this year. Because of the contract language at the time (which has now been replaced) PE class size overage dollars were calculated on a period average basis. Thus, if a school had three PE classes during second period with a total of 12 students over the class size limit, the three teachers of those classes should have split $12 for that period each day, receiving $4 each. Instead, the district’s formula incorrectly subtracted 3 students from the 12 over, resulting in payments being made only on 9 students.

That error amounted to some pretty serious money when spread out over five periods each day for the entire course of an 89-day semester. After far too long a time, I have finally been informed by the district that the corrected overage checks for first semester will be issued to PE teachers on April 10.

During the course of our investigation into this mistake, it became apparent that the district used the same faulty calculation for PE class size overages in both semesters of last year (2004/05) as well. Thus, the difficult task of reconstructing daily PE enrollment figures from 04/05 will have to take place, so that corrected amounts can be computed. Then, someone will have to determine how much each of last year’s PE teachers were actually paid in overage amounts, and determine how much they are owed, and then pay it. This process has begun but has hit some snags, so I hesitate to guess when it will be done.

Plenty has already been written about the upcoming Bylaws referendum election set for Wednesday, April 26. Several weeks ago, copies of the proposed amendments to the Bylaws were provided to school sites for review by ESTA members. In the event that those copies have disappeared between then and now, any ESTA member needing to read the proposals prior to the election date can receive duplicates by contacting either their Site President or me.

Most of the raw land likely to be developed into new residential property in the East Side is in the southeast part of the District. By some accounts, as many as 6,000 new homes could be built in the Evergreen Valley area in the next ten years, and these homes could generate as many as 1,200 high school students. With no changes in attendance boundaries and no new school to put them in, these students could mostly end up at EVHS.

Evergreen Valley High School was originally designed for 1,600 students (a colossal mistake, it would seem). It opened three years ago with 1,800 and may have as many as 2,200 students by next year. The specter of putting another 1,200 students at that site is something no one wants to contemplate. A citizens group from Evergreen has been lobbying our school board for over a year to purchase a new site out in the area for use in building a new high school. But ESUHSD has neither the money nor, it seems, the inclination to do so.

A professional demographer has delivered a study to the Board showing that existing ES high schools have the capacity to absorb another 4,000 students. If that is true, then no State money would be forthcoming to build a new high school, and every penny of the estimated $150m (or more) would have to come from local sources.

It is against this backdrop that our school board is finally taking on the issue of changing the attendance boundaries of virtually every high school in East Side. So far, at the recent school board meetings to have agendized the topic, the most outspoken group has been homeowners living in the "option area" between EVHS and MPHS.

Each such person has railed at the demographer’s recommendation that future students from their area be reassigned to MPHS. It has gotten kind of ugly. Passions run high, complete with threats, meeting disruptions, and nasty slurs mostly directed at Mt. Pleasant. It will only get worse.

From my perspective, this whole conversation should have begun at least a year ago. Maybe two. But our Board has wimped out, only allowing the problem to grow worse. Now, faced with taking action that might be implemented in time to affect school opening in the fall of this year, the ES school board has instead determined to embark upon a new series of community meetings that will result – either by design or happenstance – in no decision being made until after the November school board election.

To be sure, more than just EVHS will be affected when a final decision is made, and the board is probably right to want to go through a boundary change process only once. However, more than one person has observed that the hand-wringing our board will have to go through between now and when the matter is settled may just be their Karma in the wake of what they have put their employees through in the last 15 months.

Many ESTA members began their teaching careers in the East Side on something other than the first day of school, or were originally not teaching 100%, or have taken an unpaid leave of absence, or transferred to this district from another district. These are just some of the most common reasons why a person might not have a whole number of years in East Side for purposes of their placement on the certificated salary schedule. Thus, it is not uncommon for a teacher to have something like 8.85 years, or 26.92 years, in the East Side.

Those who are in their first 12 "salary years", such as the 8.85 year person, receive a salary that is proportional to the fraction in their salary years. That is, such a person should get the Step 8 salary, plus 85% of the difference between the Step 8 and Step 9 salaries, in whatever column they happen to be on the salary schedule. This is supposed to go on every year up until the employee reaches Step 12. Payroll sometimes refers to these folks as tweeners, because they’re between two discrete steps on the salary schedule.

However, once someone reaches Step 12, there are only four-year increments between further steps on the salary schedule until Step 32. From Step 12 until the bottom of the salary schedule, there are no tweeners. There are only people whose salary years number is at least 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, or 32 years. The one exception to this rule is described in paragraph A2 of Appendix A in the contract, which states that any decimal .5 or higher will be rounded up to the nearest whole year. Thus, if a person has 27.64 salary years at the beginning of some year, that person should be paid from Step 28 of the salary schedule for that entire year (and, of course, the next three years).

A month or so ago, I was contacted by a veteran teacher who wondered why he had not been moved on the salary schedule for a long time. I checked his placement, using a data file I had gotten from HR way back in November, and sure enough, it seemed his 27.64 years should have been enough to put him onto Step 28 this year. But the file showed him to still be on Step 24. Exploring the file a bit more resulted in my finding a total of 42 people with 12 or more years in the District who seemingly should have been moved to the next Step on the salary schedule this year because of rounding off, but were not.

Factoring in the 3.58% raise we’re getting this year, the difference between successive steps on the 12-to-32 region of the salary schedule is around $2,280. That’s some serious money.

I alerted HR to the situation, and contacted the affected bargaining unit members by email. HR checked the actual placement of each person on my list, and, oddly, found exactly half of them were placed correctly and half of them were not. I can’t explain why a file I got from HR in late November would show 42 mis-placed people, when apparently half of them had already been corrected and half of them had not been.

The District asserts it has now rectified all of the salary schedule placement errors on my list. Those folks who should have been moved have been moved, also getting a retro payment for the first portion of this school year.

Just to be safe, I re-contacted each person on the original list of 42 and recommended that they examine their pay stubs for the first six months of this school year to make sure their gross pay matches what the contract says.

Just about everyone who was around this District a year ago has vivid memories of what will forever be known as the obscene layoff. Pardon me if I’m reminding you of something you would just as soon forget, but it was only last March that some 944 of the approximately 1,200 ESTA members (about 75%) received March 15 pink slips. When all of the considerable dust had settled on that sordid affair, about 100 district employees had left (nearly all as the result of voluntary decisions to either retire or resign) and just about an equal number of new employees were hired to take their places.

This year, things were different. For one thing, there were no layoffs. None. However, the school board did approve non-renewal notices to a dozen bargaining unit members. Of this number, four were categorized as Interns or Temporary; the remainder were Probationary.

What makes this newsworthy is that in the weeks leading up to the March 9 school board meeting, site principals had recommended a total of 30 individuals for non-reelection. However, a process started last year by Bob Nunez and repeated this year by HR Director Cathy Giammona examined the record of each potential non-reelect and overrode the principal’s recommendations in 18 cases. In previous years, there did not seem to be such a process in place and virtually all of the names placed on the non-reelect list by site administrators were let go. It is not clear whether each of these 18 people realizes that an asteroid just missed their planet.

Under the Ed Code, a school board can notify any teacher prior to March 15 of their second probationary year that the teacher will not be brought back the following year. When this power is exercised, no reason for the non-reelection need be given, and there is virtually no access to due process available to the teacher. (It is this authority that our governor tried unsuccessfully to extend to five years in the special election last November).

Giammona informs me that she hopes to meet with each of the 18 teachers that were spared from non-reelection, along with an ESTA rep and a local administrator, to frankly discuss the District’s expectations of changes for these folks in the next year.

The ESTA Executive Board has approved the following timetable for the conduct of elections to choose ESTA Executive Officers (President, Vice President, Treasurer, and General Secretary).

Note that the election date of May 16 is a Tuesday, unlike most traditional ESTA election days. The day change coincides with a move of the May meeting of the ESTA Executive Board, made necessary by the District’s choice of Wednesday, May 17 as the day for a Reception Celebration for this year’s retirees.