(C) Common Dreams
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With possible strike looming, Portland Public Schools, teachers union face $200M gulf [1]
['Julia Silverman', 'Jsilverman Oregonian.Com', 'The Oregonian Oregonlive']
Date: 2023-09-28 13:00:00.344000+00:00
With just a few weeks left before members of the Portland Public School teachers union could walk off the job after months of fruitless negotiations with the state’s largest school district, relations between the two sides are frosty at best.
Accusations are flying. District officials say teachers have refused any attempts at financial compromise and are indignant that the teachers initially — though unknowingly, thanks to a now-fixed data entry mistake by the Oregon Department of Education — spread misinformation implying that classroom instruction budgets have been drastically slashed. Further, they claim the union is now slow-rolling a correction.
The union, meanwhile, is threatening legal action over the district’s refusal to allow parents to distribute pro-union material on school grounds. The district has cited a policy that only allows district-sponsored materials to be circulated on campuses. The union also says that their deep concerns over working conditions are being minimized as hyperbolic and apocryphal.
Late last week, both sides delivered their last, best offers to state mediators, triggering an automatic 30-day cooling off period. Three more mediation sessions are scheduled for October, but there’s a yawning $200 million gap between what the teachers say they want and what the district is offering to pay for.
Stuck in the middle: Students and families who are just beginning to bounce back after some of the country’s longest school building closures of the pandemic era. As the potential reality of a strike sets in, their loyalties are divided too.
“I’ve heard it said over and over again that ‘teaching is a calling’, as if that should make up for low pay and long hours,” wrote Isabel Johnson, whose son attends Glencoe Elementary, in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive. “In Oregon, women make up 71% of teaching positions. I cannot help but think this is part of the reason that teachers are not given the respect and salaries they deserve.”
“I appreciate our hard working teachers and I want them to be paid well, but striking would be such a disservice to their students and our children that I will be very disappointed and frustrated if it comes to that,” David Bean, a parent of middle and high schoolers in the district, wrote to the newspaper. He pointed to recently released state test scores that he said showed that “our children have struggled as a result of not being in school.”
The two sides are closer in salary and benefits proposals than their rhetoric might suggest. The district’s offer calls for boosting its current spending on salaries by at least $143 million over three years, above the current $430 million that it currently spends on educator salaries, which consumes about half of its unrestricted budget. The Portland Association of Teachers wants an increase of $203 million above current spending in the same time period — a gap that’s not unbridgeable if the district is willing to significantly spend down its reserves, though that’s a risky strategy in an era of declining enrollment.
The real chasm comes over planning time. Union leaders argue that their members are desperate for more time to do their jobs well — to craft lessons, grade papers, communicate with families and work on individual learning plans for their students. Giving them the time they’ve asked for will cost about $139 million, according to the union’s final offer.
They’re proposing 440 minutes a week for every teacher, kindergarten to high school, up from the 320 minutes that teachers have now. The union is also seeking extra non-instructional days dedicated solely to planning four times a year, in addition to a voluntary day before the start and after the end of each school year and extra pay for teachers with both higher numbers of students and those who work in schools where students have the highest needs, academically and emotionally.
“We are very adamant that there are ways for us to ensure that students still get the appropriate instructional time and hours, but that they can have higher quality instructional time and hours if we have the time to prepare for that,” said Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Association of Teachers.
The district’s final offer does not include any additional planning days, though they have offered an extra 40 minutes a week of prep time for some educators.
The union’s request on planning time would cut too deeply into students’ time with their teachers, an especially tender spot given how many students are still trying to catch up after a year spent learning mostly online, said Renard Adams, the district’s director of research, assessment and accountability.
“We do have a strong recognition that teachers need planning time, and that helps with what they’re doing in the classroom,” said Sharon Reese, the district’s human resources director. “But the reality is, we are not willing to sacrifice student instruction time and we don’t see a trade-off that we have to give.”
The two sides can’t even come to an agreement over student discipline, a topic they’ve been at loggerheads about for nearly a year, with both sides trying to claim the moral high ground. The district wants to do away with contract language that they say unfairly consigns students to five-day suspensions from school for “harm, threats and fear of harm.” School board members have sent clear signals that they want to see this provision removed from any negotiated agreement. District officials have also adamantly opposed the teachers’ proposal that every school should have a staffed and safe space where children with extreme behavior issues can go to calm down, likening it to a costly form of segregation.
“Our Black students, our Latinx students and our students with disabilities are disproportionately suspended, referred and expelled from schools. It is a challenge,” Adams said. The mandatory five-day suspensions are not the sole reason for that, but are a contributing factor, he said.
The union counters that principals and teachers already have the discretion to reduce suspension penalties, though they say the district has refused to track how often that happens. They also say that children with behavior issues are already sent to separate spaces: Hallways where their meltdown is on display for the whole school to see.
“What’s happening is that schools are not safe, kids don’t feel safe. And we have educators who are also getting harmed at work,” Bonilla said. “We’ve asked for spaces for kids to cool down so that you’re not in crisis in front of all of your peers and then having to deal with that shame coming back. You should have a space where you can get that guidance and that support to regulate.”
One huge question: How would the district fund either proposal?
Bonilla says the answer lies at least partly in the district’s reserve funds, intended to be a cushion against a rainy day and a signal that the district is fiscally stable enough to merit low interest rates on the massive construction bonds it has floated to rebuild its high schools and update a handful of its other aging buildings. Portland has let its reserve fund balance grow to nearly $100 million, or about 12% of its general fund, which even district officials will concede is on the high side.
But that’s one time money that the district is already dipping into to meet spending costs this year, said Claire Hertz, a former Deputy Superintendent for Business and Operations whom the district has brought back to help with negotiations. Forecasts call for it to be sliced in half in coming budgets — though that is subject to change — and having less than 5% in reserves is financially risky.
Bonilla says the district has also run up administrative spending in recent years, at a growth rate that outstrips the raises offered to teachers and other union members. But administrators — including principals, vice principals and district leaders who oversee areas from technology support to testing to payroll — combined cost the district about $60 million a year – not enough to make a serious dent in the union’s requests, even if some central office jobs were eliminated or there were salary reductions.
The union has also taken aim at the budget set-aside for purchasing of materials and services, saying it is bloated with highly-paid consultants offering trainings that some teachers say they could take or leave, to the tune of $110 million for the current school year, a $12 million increase from the 2022-2023 school year.
The district has countered that those gains were driven largely by transportation and utility cost increases. School bus driver wages have risen to compete with Amazon, UPS and FedEx, costing $30 million a year, or nearly $11 million more than in the 2022-2023 school year, Hertz said. Rising utility rates, including the costs of air conditioning slowly being installed in district buildings, ate up another $12 million in the current budget, a $3.7 million increase.
Hertz and others defended spending on state-mandated curriculum adoptions, which were backlogged during the pandemic, and on training for teachers on how to adapt to the new materials, pointing to overall district wide growth on state reading, writing and math tests as evidence that those investments paid off.
Julia Brim-Edwards, who sits both on the school board and the Multnomah County Commission, said ultimately it will come down to trade-offs. She said spending more on salaries and planning time now might set up a choice for later: Fewer teachers and bigger classes, cutting back on art, music, counseling and other non-core academic classes or a shorter school year.
“Frankly, it’s not required that you offer art and music and a specific number of library hours,” she said. “You could find savings but they’re not going to be savings that don’t touch students.”
The upcoming mediation sessions are scheduled for Oct. 2, 11 and 17.
— Julia Silverman,
[email protected], @jrlsilverman
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[1] Url:
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/09/with-possible-strike-looming-portland-public-schools-teachers-union-face-200m-gulf.html
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