"In business, you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate." -- Chester L Karrass
I shoulda remembered that four months ago, when I first sat as member of the Boulder Valley Education Association's bargaining team in our annual round of negotiations over salaries and benefits for the professional educators of Boulder Valley School District. It would have behooved me to recall my experience in another district a few years ago, where I learned that central administrations can and do run roughshod over their employees, regardless of the detrimental effects on their district's students.
In other words, I should have gone with my gut and realized that despite endless hours of coy platitudes and claims of near-bankruptcy, the BVSD School Board's designees were actually engaging in nothing more than the hoary old tactic of dragging their feet until near the end of the school year, then making a "last best offer" so odious that teachers would be forced into a choice between expediency and dignity.
It didn't have to turn out this way. This year's negotiations actually began amidst considerable goodwill back in early February, with both sides agreeing to use an "interest-based" bargaining model, in which a facilitator helps both sides identify key issues and the means to work collaboratively toward meeting each side's identified needs. Positive intent is assumed under this model of bargaining – the idea is that BVEA and BVSD trust one another enough to put all our cards face-up on the table at the outset, then work together to assemble the best hand possible.
Perhaps such a trust-based scheme actually works somewhere, someplace – but not, apparently, in Boulder Valley Public Schools. Here, the teachers' team (naively, as it turns out) placed its faith in the system and in BVSD's stated intentions to respect the process, only to learn with 3 weeks left in the school year that the District would be offering no more than a 0% Cost of Living Allowance, salary increment credit (vertical "steps" on the salary schedule) for one year, a 1% one-time bonus (they're calling it a "stipend"), and, for that extra-special little "screw you," two additional days on the contract dedicated to professional development, paid at a per-diem rate. The offer was demonstrably worse than the one Superintendent King's team put on the table only a month ago.
Side Rant: A huge chunk of federal stimulus money is supposed to be directed specifically at salaries (see below), yet the District's position amounts to saying that the money is either earmarked – the only way they can give us two days' worth of wages, they claim, is by having us sit through 16 hours of federally-mandated professional development - or that it's one-time money that can't be guaranteed in future revenue streams. The first argument is a simple load of crap: there's no provision in the stimulus law directing districts to spend money on professional development or face the prospect of losing it entirely. The second District position brings us back to their misguided spending priorities.
What the District did is termed "regressive bargaining," and it's verboten under an interest-based system. A given side doesn't get to put offers on the table, then take them back; rather, both sides look at all the resources at hand, then work together to make the requisite decisions and choices to ensure the needs of all stakeholders are met. Also forbidden under the agreed-to bargaining model is the taking of public positions regarding items under discussion in the closed bargaining sessions – a provision frequently violated by BVSD over the past few months, as Superintendent King and several of his designees took to fear-mongering in the local press over phantasmal budget shortfalls. Nary a week passed that we weren't greeted with an announcement at some public forum or another that revenue was declining to the point of hiring freezes, increased class sizes, and the curbing of popular services, even as legislators in Denver and Washington scrambled to provide stimulus funding to prevent exactly the fiscal apocalypse that BVSD was spinning as inevitable.
The issue certainly wasn't one of lack of resources, despite a District-sponsored media blitz to the contrary in February and March. In fact, when revenue streams were threatened by Congressional shenanigans back in April, Colorado Education Association legislative liaisons and citizen activists, including many from the BVEA, sprang into action to secure for our employers the funds they'd need to pay us: thus, when a triumvirate of powerful Senators launched a misguided attempt to tinker with this year's School Finance Act, organized educators from across the state descended on Denver to convince legislators to uphold their obligations under Colorado's Amendment 23, a forward-looking school funding law passed by voter initiative a few years ago (and about the only thing protecting us from evisceration under our state's "Taxpayer Bill Of Rights (TABOR)." We were successful, both in restoring the funding and in removing the fig leaf Superintendent Chris King was trying to use to cover his pile of gold.
The District's assertion that its revenue circumstances have changed over the course of the negotiations is true only insofar as they've gotten considerably rosier as time has passed: regardless of the doom-n'-gloom scenarios being predicted by BVSD officials back in February, legislative changes to the School Finance Act, as well as stimulus money disbursed by the Federal government, now leaves BVSD sitting on over $20,000,000 that could be used to at least make a stab at keeping their employee's wages from falling too far behind the rate of inflation. That rate, by the way, was pegged at 3.9% this year, and forms the basis for the "inflation + 1%" school financing required by Amendment 23 – and before your ask: yes, BVSD did receive its full 4.9% funding increase this year, with the only stipulation being that 1.9% has to be held in reserve until late January 2010, and that 45% of that disbursement goes to paying for charter schools.
The District has attempted to use "the economy" – with all the unstated, but sinister, implications thereto pertaining – as a smokescreen behind which it hides the fact that it is awash with cash, much of it specifically intended to aid school districts in helping their employees ride out the prolonged downturn. Vice President Biden said as much on March 12:
"The first priority is to put money in people's pockets. Second is to create new jobs."
And that's just the federal funding; at the state and local levels, adjustments to TABOR reserve requirements and health benefits have freed up another $8 million. The long and the short of it is: they've got the money. They're just choosing to spend it on priorities other than their teaching staff.
For a while – a long while – it seemed as though the Superintendent's team was actually partnering with us to meet our rather modest request for the implementation of a Professional Salary Schedule, which would have new teachers starting at $40k, with the potential to double that within a decade or so through the pursuit of postgraduate education and training. Such schedules are being adopted with increasing frequency around the state – Summit County just adopted a 3-year implementation plan, part of which consists of a 4.16% salary increase for 09-10 – and when put into the context of median income here in Boulder County, a Professional Salary Schedule just isn't too much to ask. It would cost about a quarter of this year's available revenue to implement, and would actually save the District money in the long run, but that doesn't ally BVSD's fear that it might wind up with the highest-paid teaching staff in the state. Perhaps the District is more interested in preserving its other, more dubious, distinctions – like having the highest administrator-to-teacher ratio in Colorado, or the fact that more than 40 people at the Administration Building hold titles of Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, Director, Supervisor, and Manager.
After all, a salary of $40k means that a first-year teacher would be earning fully 70% of the Area Median Income in Boulder, listed last year at $62,500 for a single-member household. This would lift BVSD out of what it surely considers the embarrassing status quo, in which a starting teacher in a two-person, single-income household (not an unreasonable proposition for a couple just starting out after college) is paid so poorly that the Department of Housing and Urban Development considers him a "very low" wage earner, and would qualify the young couple for a wide array of assistance programs.
Is this truly the message the School Board wished to send its "most valuable resource" when its deputies marched in to our negotiation session on May 5th? It's hard to say – but the District team's only response to being asked why they were unilaterally changing the rules was that they "would be able to sell this proposal to the Board." I'll bet they would: what boss wouldn't want to hear that the employees had agreed to what amounted to a pay cut for at least three years into the future?
Still, it's disturbing that the District would make this argument in the first place. Is this the way taxpayers want the elected School Board to treat the people who care for their children eight and more hours per day? Really? Is 2% and some decimal dust over a two-year period all we're worth, even knowing that the District is currently wallowing in ten times that amount? No doubt Superintendent King and his cast of thousands at the Administration Building are overjoyed at the prospect, and are even now plotting how to squander the stimulus windfall on more and costlier programs of dubious efficacy and on the strengthening of their own bureaucratic fiefdoms, but is that really how tax money should be spent?
Through their actions, the School Board's representatives have made their position clear: negotiations sessions took the members of our team out of our classrooms for more than eleven days this semester. Put another way, our students spent two weeks of instructional time this semester being taught by substitutes, while their classroom teachers made a good-faith effort to work with the District toward a goal their team never had any intention of reaching.
Today's Boulder Daily Camera featured dueling op-ed pieces (I had some input on the teacher one, which is why some of the phrasing here may sound familiar), one from the teacher's side, one from admin, and the comment threads attached to them continue an online conversation that's been going on since late last week. I'm interested in hearing what my fellow Kossacks think – in these tough economic times, should we union types sit meekly back and accept that our bosses have tried their hardest and simply can't find anything more, or is it time to take to the streets? As indicated in the video at the opening of this little rant, many of us here in Boulder have already cast our lot, so if you're amenable, a little shout-out of support wouldn't hurt, either.