Guest column: Status quo ‘unworkable’ for Poway Unified employees association

Readers have now seen the columns by Poway Unified School Board President Kimberley Beatty (March 26) and Poway Federation of Teachers President Candy Smiley (April 2) concerning labor relations at the district. There is another perspective that often gets overlooked in these conversations — that of over 2,000 classified employees at PUSD. The Poway School Employees Association (PSEA) represents approximately 1,600 of these employees, roughly an equal number to PFT. But our experiences could not be more different.

To understand why the status quo does not work for the majority of PUSD employees, consider two ways the district treats classified employees worse than teachers.

Currently, only half of PSEA members are eligible for benefits, whereas nearly all PFT members are benefit-eligible. This is because PUSD routinely hires two unbenefited three-hour employees to perform one six-hour job. PSEA has long advocated creating more benefitted positions — particularly employees working with special education students — to reduce turnover and ensure that students and parents receive the best possible service. The district, however, has refused. As a result, PUSD’s special education department has a severe shortage of instructional assistants and risks litigation for violating students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), because job applicants simply aren’t interested in unbenefited three-hour positions.

PSEA members who are benefitted, meanwhile, must pay $1,172 each month to insure their family on the Aetna Value HMO plan (one of two “basic” plans at PUSD), whereas teachers and management only pay $531/month for the exact same benefits. To put this starkly, a first-year employee working four hours a day as an elementary library media technician does not earn enough to insure his or her family on the Aetna Value HMO plan and would end up not only with zero take-home pay, but would actually have to pay the district for the balance owed for health insurance. A first year teacher, meanwhile, makes $20/hour more than that elementary library media technician but pays $641 less every month for those same benefits. It is immoral for PUSD to charge its lowest-paid workers more than twice as much as teachers and management for the exact same health insurance benefits.

The PSEA brought these concerns to the table during 2014 reopener negotiations (which started in February 2014 and only recently concluded) but was told the district had no money to remedy these inequities. Imagine our shock to learned that, at the same time PUSD was telling PSEA it could not afford to address our concerns, it was negotiating salary increases with PFT which would more than pay to eliminate the health care inequities between PSEA and PFT. For more information, see: https://tinyurl.com/PSEAupdate7.

PSEA appreciates that PFT and PUSD utilize an Interest Based Problem Solving (IBPS) process to address fiscal matters and we think IBPS is a useful tool. In fact, PSEA has repeatedly asked to participate in fiscal IBPS sessions, so that all stakeholders are at the table. But both PFT and PUSD have refused to allow PSEA’s participation, which means more than half of the district’s workforce is excluded from these critical discussions.

PFT claims the current IBPS process takes into consideration “district priorities … identified in our Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP).” History shows otherwise. During last year’s LCAP process, Superintendent John Collins responded to parents’ requests to “replace services provided by parents with paid paraprofessionals” by promising that PUSD would “continue to work on staffing schools to the levels they were staffed prior to the budget cuts begun in 2007-2008.” See: https://tinyurl.com/LCAP-2014. But when PSEA proposed those very restorations — such as increasing library staffing — the district refused, pleading poverty. Yet, when the superintendent sat down with PFT in their IBPS sessions this year, his promise to restore classified positions fell by the wayside, in favor of proposing wage increases for teachers.

This is why the status quo is unworkable, and why PUSD needs an inclusive IPBS process together with a meaningful LCAP process.