Poway Unified teachers pack school board meeting

Hundreds of Poway Unified School District teachers attended Monday night’s school board meeting to send a message to the school board: Don’t mess with a negotiating process that has served the district well since 1996.

Crammed into the large district office meeting room and overflowing into the lobby and parking lot, teachers wearing union-provided blue T-shirts supporting the Interest Based Problem Solving process heard over two-dozen speakers — including two former school board members — address the board on whether the process should be used to address future educational and monetary issues, including teacher salary and wages.

Board members offered little comment on what they heard other than to say they wanted to learn more about the process and perhaps sit in on sessions.

Part of that may have been a reflection of sentiments expressed at the meeting’s outset by board member Charles Sellers, who said he didn’t think anyone on the board opposed IBPS.

“You’re pushing against an open door,” Sellers told the standing-room-only audience.

Whatever issues members have with it “can be easily corrected,” he said. He spoke specifically about a district tradition where negotiating team members from both the district and the Poway Federation of Teachers receive whatever compensation adjustments are negotiated for the teachers.

“I do not support self-dealing ... it’s a blatant conflict of interest,” the first-year board members told the audience. The so-called “me too” provision should be “uncoupled” from the process, he said. He asked each board member whether they’d be willing to do that but received no replies.

Former board member Marc Davis addressed that issue in his remarks, noting that “me-too” language “is a two-way street” where bargaining team members, including Supt. John Collins, have in past years accepted the same salary reductions as teachers. He also urged the board to “defend your team” against attacks in the media.

In recent weeks the IBPS process has been placed under the spotlight by Sellers and board President Kimberley Beatty. They have questioned “me-too” provision and have objected to what has been labeled a “fair share” agreement reached between the district and the PFT during the IBPS process regarding percentages of school budgets that should be used for teacher salary increases. Their position is that school board members, on behalf of district taxpayers, should be the ones making that determination.

In a March 25 guest column in this newspaper, Beatty wrote, “In a nutshell, this battle is over who controls the budget priorities of the school district — school board trustees, who are elected citizen representatives of the community, or a small group comprised of the superintendent, his management team and the leadership of the teachers’ union.” She accused PFT President Candy Smiley of waging “a scorched-earth smear campaign against the school board using lies, false accusations and distorted disclosures of confidential closed session information.”

Beatty’s written comments were attacked Tuesday night by former school board member Steve McMillan.

“The trust you have destroyed with a single op-ed piece is staggering,” McMillan said. “Do not allow the hard work of so many to be destroyed.” A prolonged, standing ovation followed his remarks.

Smiley told the board the PFT and its members “are extending ourselves to the board. We are asking you to be our dance partner ... this dance is called the IBPS.”

Parent Eric Bruvold, the husband of a special education teacher in the district, implored the board to separate from the IBPS aspects it does not agree with but to keep the process in place. The benefit of IBPS, he said, was that all sides first agree to facts and then work out their issues based on those facts.

Currently, the board uses IBPS only with the teachers union; the two unions representing non-teaching employees are not involved. One of them, the Poway School Employees Association, tried out the process in 2013-14 but found it lacking, PSEA President Lynette Turner said.

However, the head of Local 221 of the Service Employees International Union told the board he’d be interested. Nick Lombardo said he had not even heard of IBPS until a few weeks ago, joking that he thought the initials stood for “International Brotherhood of Professional Surfers.”

“We’ve never been involved, and we wonder why,” Lombardo told the board. Classified (non-teaching) workers deserve to be treated fairly, he said.