Plenty of blame in unsettled contract
We attended the Benicia High graduation ceremony and were impressed with the accomplishments of the graduates. Student academic accomplishments were highlighted, a record number of scholarships were noted (top-rated colleges were the destination of many), athletic team championships were listed and plentiful, and a fantastic performing arts program involving so many students was featured.
A quality high school program doesn’t just happen. It is built by top-notch, dedicated and caring teachers supported by other staff and the community.
The fact that the teachers’ contract between the Benicia Teachers Association and Benicia Unified School District has not been settled is most disturbing, and there is plenty of blame to go around for this failure.
Union negotiators signed a tentative agreement, and then union representatives at the school sites advocated their members vote against the proposed contract thus demonstrating union insincerity and/or ineffectiveness. The district leadership lacked any sincere effort to settle the contract and dragged the process out for almost the entire school year while approving other expenditures in the meantime. The governor and legislature pushed the unfunded liability of STRS down to local school districts by requiring them to contribute significantly more local revenue to shore up the statewide system, thus severely impacting a local district budget and restricting a district’s ability to grant sufficient raises for employees.
The negotiations process is not over but a creative solution must be found or the district, and our children, will lose when our teachers are demoralized and look elsewhere to teach.
There is a school board election this fall. Perhaps we need a change at the very top.
Bill and Sandy Franchini,
Benicia
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A good handful of very expensive, unnecessary, and decorative administrators can be cut to supplement teachers’ salaries.
The district depends on keeping obedient teachers who are just scared enough to “passively accept all these increasingly stressful jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
-George Carlin
It amazes me how parents don’t seem to realize how much power they have when it comes to making policy concerning educating their kids in the district. Parents have more power than the administrators and school board. In fact, the administration and school board work for them!
Dear parents, if you want to pay your students’ teachers what they truly earn, take the time and effort to organize and have your voices heard.
Speak out in mass, protest the greediness and self-righteousness of the administration, and see what happens. Your unused power needs to be put into play; and, if you play it right, the outcome would be breathtaking.
Dear Teachers,
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic.
Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year;
it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise
and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
-Congressman John Lewis, (my hero)
Dissent Is Patriotic.
It’s Also a Powerful Antidote to Propaganda.
-ACLU
Firing administrators would help with paying teachers, but the schools do require thousands of man hours to complete the bureaucratic paperwork to get money back from the state and feds. The District is likely to be engaging in an attrition war and “encouraging” teachers at the top end of the pay scale to retire/leave in favor of teachers who do the same babysitting for less…granted, the quality of education will go down, but the bottom line will look better for a while.
I don’t have answers, only pessimism about the system of public education. It is just too expensive to attempt to train everyone–but that is one of the foundations of democracy. Like I said, I dunno.
Dear Speaker to Vegetables,
If I could tell stories about all the excessive funds wasted by district administrators’ decisions during my time teaching there, taxpayers would be floored. (I taught from 1990-2012). Also, the school district’s sentries made sure the truth about all that was never revealed. It seems likely it continues to operate that way today because teachers can’t behave as if the emperor has no clothes. (Sound familiar?)
You mentioned “Firing administrators would help with paying teachers, but the schools do require thousands of man hours to complete the bureaucratic paperwork to get money back from the state and feds.”
My guess is that all of the district administration’s wasted funds, dispensed through uninformed decisions, could more than cover the cost of the mentioned bureaucratic paperwork.
In my mind, the only answer is to continue speaking out in support of public education, and against bloated administration that takes away from the quality of that education. Even though the change will come in small increments, bit by bit, that’s fine with me.
But it’s dishonest to turn a blind eye from the fact that administrators do not directly improve the education of our kids; and, indirectly, even affect a negative influence, via zapping huge sums of money from our classrooms,
Dissent is patriotic.