SD school administrators’ union agrees to concessions
The San Diego Unified School District has reached a contract agreement with the union representing principals and vice principals that includes concessions similar to those given by the district’s teachers, including deferring raises and extending furlough days.
The tentative pact announced Friday saves the jobs of five administrators who were slated to be laid off and halts a plan to have some vice principals working four-day weeks instead of five.
The agreement also includes an incentive that could encourage up to 13 principals to retire, which could provide some salary savings. The union represents about 280 administrators.
Board President John Lee Evans praised the Administrators Association San Diego for “sharing the sacrifice” district teachers already made. The district reached a contract agreement with the teachers union in late June that allowed the layoff of nearly 1,500 teachers and counselors to be rescinded.
“Some of the other units were facing a lot more layoffs than this particular group was,” Evans said at a news conference. “We can certainly make the class sizes larger, but we couldn’t do away with having a principal at a school. This group has taken the moral challenge to sit down and share the sacrifice as everyone else is doing across the district.”
The agreement calls for additional furlough days to kick in if a proposed tax-hike ballot measure fails to win voter approval in November. The state has said it would shave 14 days off the 2012-13 academic year if the measure fails.
Principals now take 10 furlough days while vice principals and other administrators take between three and six.
Under the previous contract, a 2 percent salary increase was scheduled to go into effect July 1, with a 2 percent raise to follow on Jan. 1 and a 3 percent bump next June.
“Most principals felt it would be an extremely uncomfortable situation to go in and be getting a pay raise, getting a significant pay raise, while your teachers are having this sacrifice,” said Don Craig, principal at Grant K-8 school in Mission Hills and chair of the bargaining team. “Even though we probably didn’t make a whole lot of difference as far as money value because we are fairly small unit, the show of solidarity was important for teachers to see.”
Administrators will be voting on the tentative agreement over the next 10 days. The pact will be considered by the school board at its September meeting.
“We’ve done everything we can possibly do at the local level to make this next school year a successful year,” Evans said. “Now we need to look to Sacramento, we need to look to the state, we have to look to the voters of California to really approve the funds that we need through the ballot measures and anything else the Legislature can do to make sure our schools are properly funded in the following years.”
In May, San Diego Unified laid off one in five teachers and made other cuts to help offset a projected $122 million deficit in next year’s $1.1 billion operating budget.