Board members, Dr. Gándara, colleagues and community members. My name is Roberto Rodriguez and today I’m here as Chair of the SEA Bargaining Team. Our team members include: Chuck Patterson (ORH); Jason Leichter (CVA); Colleen Cooke-Salas (MVM) Martin Casas (ELH) and Katina Rondeau (AVA). I'm here this evening to present our proposal to the Board of Trustees and the community.
You may not know that our by-laws and our responsibility of fair representation requires us to develop our proposal based on input from our unit members. In order to do this we held open hearings, surveyed our members and visited sites in order to get a sense of our members’ priorities. The team took this information and developed the document that has been available both on Board docs and on the SEA Website.
While I won’t read the proposal I will say that It should be of no surprise, after years of stagnant salaries and an increase in out-of-pocket medical costs that salary and medical benefits are our members’ top 2 priorities. What was surprising was that their third priority, class size, was statistically equal in ranking to wages. Three years ago class size was a distant third priority. It’s clear our members are feeling the consequences of an already increased staffing ratio and an ever increasing work load. The rest of our members concerns can be read in our proposal.
We hope that the district will engage in good faith bargaining and that all negotiable items will be resolved at the table. However, it’s difficult to keep hope alive when we receive multiple reports that principals have been asked to create master schedules that don’t respect our MOU and when it took almost a month to receive the districts second interim budget report after it had been filed with the county. We received this document on the Friday before Spring Break. Good faith bargaining demands that current agreements be respected and documents be delivered on time. This has caused an unnecessary delay in our preparation to come to the table. Rest assured that I and my team will never come to the table unprepared. I suggest that as we proceed, that the bargaining process be respected and that we come to the table seeking a fair and equitable agreement.
In closing I will quote the opening paragraph of our proposal which expresses the spirit with which we come to the table:
“The Association recognizes the current state of the economy and the budgetary constraints of all school districts and is willing to collaborate with the district in creating a fair and equitable collective bargaining agreement. Therefore, the Association will protect its core values of sustaining and creating an educational environment that facilitates student learning, instruction, safety, academic integrity, and that provides association unit members a fair and equitable standard of living.”
I urge this board to ensure that all of our current agreements be respected so that we can proceed with contract negotiations in this spirit of collaboration. Finally, in light of the revelations in this afternoon's U-T website, I would suggest that 3 high school social science teachers, a middle school math teacher and 2 alternative Ed teachers hardly merit the expense of a PR firm and a law firm to deal with negotiations. Since our last negotiations we've come to mutually beneficial agreements without outside interventions......Thank you.
