The Recruitment and Retention Crisis at Sac City
Recruitment and Retention Crisis at Sac City Gets Worse
Recent reports in the media capture Sac City’s growing crisis to recruit and retain teachers. The Sacramento Bee, ABC-10 News, Fox News 40 and CBS News 13 detail the District’s self-inflicted crisis of underpaying educators.
Unfortunately, rather than address the real problem, Sac City has resorted to going to the Philippines to hire teachers, particularly in special education. We welcome the educators from the Philippines, but have raised concerns regarding the lack of support the District has provided to them. No other district in the region has as many vacancies as Sac City, even though Sac City is in the best financial position in its history.
In a recent communication, School Board President Jay Hansen conceded that low educator pay puts students at risk.
A much simpler, longer lasting solution would be to make salaries more competitive–an argument we will be making in fact-finding very shortly.
Fact-finding Panel Set
Hearing Expected in September
Last week, PERB confirmed that Andrea Dooley was appointed as the neutral chairperson of the fact-finding panel. Ms. Dooley joins the SCTA representative, SCTA Executive Director John Borsos, and the District representative, Jack Parham, an outside attorney from southern California.
Ms. Dooley was the neutral third party when we went to fact-finding last year regarding our wage re-opener.
The parties are now in the process of developing the set of issues before the fact-finding panel. There is no date yet scheduled for the fact-finding panel to convene.
District Continues With Alternative Facts About Bargaining
Actual Proposals Contradict Public Statements
Prior to the commencement of fact-finding, we have requested that the District clarify its last position on all outstanding issues, since recent public statements contradict the position it has taken at the bargaining table.
For example, in a recent communication, the District states it has proposed at 2% increase for 2016-17, and a 4% increase for 2017-18. But the District’s actual, official proposal only offers an increase in 2017-18, only if the District “based entirely on all savings, up to 4%” from changing the health plan. NO SAVINGS, NO INCREASES. In fact, the district was forced to admit that the savings estimate in their written proposal was completely made up!
The District has proposed no guaranteed wage increases for 2017-18 or 2018-19. In fact, the District has proposed re-openers in the second and third years of the agreement, specifically “excluding compensation” from being discussed.
In other words, for three years, the District is only committing to a guaranteed 2% increase, or 0.666667% per year.
In addition, the District has rejected our proposal to eliminate the cap on where incoming teachers can be placed on the wage scale, retroactive to July 2015, at the same time we learned that over the last two years, the District gave full credit to several new teachers when it came to salary placement. Since learning of this we demanded that the District apply that same standard to all Sac City educators, retroactively, like Ed Code requires.
At the same time, the District has rejected all proposals to decrease class sizes, add support staff, and improve special education. In fact, the District has proposed INCREASING the class size maximums for SDC Mild/Moderate teachers.
A copy of the Association’s last proposal can be found here. A copy of the District’s last official proposal summary can be found here.
LATEST NEWS
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
