PUSD teachers vote to trim school year
Science teachers Andrew Schultz, Tom Oliver, Robert Whitney and Mike Kurth gather for a department meeting. They meet every Wednesday to discuss new developments.
With 248 teachers’ jobs in jeopardy, the Poway Federation of Teachers (PFT) decided to follow in the steps of the California School Employees Association (CSEA) and the Association of Poway School Managers (APSM) and administer a vote April 16 and 17 that would roll back each teacher’s salary by 2.7 percent and shorten the 2009-10 teachers’ school year by five days. A total of 69.33 percent of teachers and 34 of the district’s 36 school sites approved the reductions.
Along with acceptance of the rollback from the CSEA and the APSM, the district will be saving almost $4.5 million, funding that will bring back about 154 teachers and $800,000 worth of CSEA positions.
PFT Director Candy Smiley said the decision to execute this vote was based on multiple circumstances.
“We want to keep as many teachers employed as possible,” Smiley said. “We wanted to make sure we had as many programs in place for our students, and we wanted our class sizes to not increase more than they have because they are already higher than we’d like. It would be better for us to keep people employed and keep programs for kids.”
The preparation for the vote began just a few weeks prior.
Superintendent Don Phillips and PFT President Marc Houle visited each PUSD school site in order to speak to teachers and inform them about what this vote meant for the district. PFT leaders also kept in touch with teachers through emails and notices.
“We talked about the budget from the state of California and the consequences for the school district,” Smiley said. “We held meetings with teachers, and we communicated through emails to try and help people understand the budget, how much we are getting, and where it has to go.”
Westview’s PFT representative, Spanish teacher Christian Michel, led a meeting with Westview’s teachers the day before the vote took place and explained the benefits of voting for the rollback. He also showed a PowerPoint that outlined the pros and cons.
While the vote was scheduled to be administered on April 16 and 17, a re-vote occurred at three schools, Westview, Mt. Carmel and Poway, due to election irregularities.
Each ballot was numbered and when PFT collected the ballots, they realized some of the ballots were missing and others had been copied. Smiley said this most likely occurred because some teachers didn’t receive a ballot and another teacher would offer to make a copy of theirs.
“Some of the ballots had been copied,” Smiley said. “That was an accident, but then we have no way of knowing. So at those school sites we stopped the election and started all over again.”
Once the ballots were finally counted, the results were released on April 22.
The teachers in the district, as a whole, decided to take a 2.7 percent pay cut, but also accepted the decision to take five days off their work calendar. These five days are Professional Growth Days, meaning the days teachers usually have to meet together to discuss curriculum and teaching strategies will be gone.
English teacher Amy Degenfelder said this will force teachers to really make use of the hour they have on Wednesday mornings together and may even result in teachers using after school hours for this work.
“It’s not fair to ask teachers to do what would be done on those five days if it’s no longer in their contract hours,” Degenfelder said. “So professionally, you can’t ask teachers to do that work, but realistically teachers will still continue to do the most needed work for their students in the time they have and the time they can give up themselves.”
The vote that ended in favor of the salary rollback isn’t the only source of money the district has found to save jobs.
Recently, the state has allowed school districts to take $4 million from categorical money, which is usually used for textbooks and programs like GATE, and disperse the funds elsewhere in the district, such as teacher’s paychecks.
“The state gave us flexibility in categorical money,” Smiley said. “This was all brand new, and they had to give us permission to do this. This is a four-year flexibility time period that the state is giving districts. So the school district would have been able to bring back some teachers with this categorical money [before the vote], but now with the $3.2 million from the vote, we can bring back a lot more.”
While the district has an estimate as to how much money it will now have to save employees, Principal Dawn Kastner said it is still waiting on money that could be received from other sources.
“We have to wait for the governor’s revise and the state vote [May 19],” Kastner said. “We also have to find out who is taking a leave, retiring or taking a job somewhere else.”
At this point, Kastner said each school is looking at the master schedule of next year and totaling the number of teachers needed per class. The district will then, based on the seniority system, hire back teachers.
The district will inform all the teachers that will be hired back by Monday.
“Although we’ll know some people are okay, I doubt we will have a definite number before the school year ends,” Kastner said.
Nearly 100 percent of teachers at Westview voted and of that, 78.13 percent of the teachers were in favor of the salary cut.
With hundreds of jobs on the line, Kastner said she was very pleased with how the vote turned out.
“I was not surprised at all at Westview,” Kastner said. “We always get slammed hardest out of all the schools because we have such a young staff. Literally, half of our staff had been told they might not be coming back next year, and what I love about our staff is that they really are like a family and they take care of each other. Even though it meant a lot of sacrifice, they wanted to take care of each other, and I’m just really proud of them.”