San Francisco’s public school community has been breathing a little easier since a contract settlement was reached between the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and SEIU Local 790, representing school support staff such as secretaries, custodians and cafeteria workers. The agreement is tentative, pending ratification by SEIU members and a vote by the Board of Education (BOE) of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Details of the agreement are not yet public. (http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/home/SchoolStrikeAverted.pdf). ##M:{more]##
This agreement is a huge victory for all concerned as a strike would have been disastrous for the children, families and staff in our district. Still, while everyone is relieved, anxiety remains because the position of our teachers is similar (and some have argued worse) to the situation 790 workers were facing.
No pay raises in several years, no contract for about a year, and negotiations underway during times of low-funding and many changes in the district. While we now know who our interim superintendent will be, Gwen Chan, there are still the issues of crafting a new student assignment plan and probably closing some schools.
No easy answers can be found to address any of these problems, but one issue which touches many of them is of course the lack of sufficient funding for schools. Talk has been floating around for awhile now about putting a parcel tax on an upcoming ballot in order to bring in more resources. especially to increase teachers’ salaries. Making it feasible for teachers to live in San Francisco is at or near the top of almost everyone’s list of the most important things to get done for our schools. A parcel tax is a locally controllable way to go about this, as we know that for right now, there are few friends of public education holding purse-strings in Sacramento.
A parcel tax could work for San Francisco, but it’s certainly not an equitable way to address education needs throughout our state, or if one is thinking a bit more radically, throughout our nation. These are really state and federal level issues and that is where the real battle must be fought.
Salvaging Proposition 98 is the first option that must be exhausted. In August of this year, the California Teachers Association (CTA), California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, and three parents sued Governor Schwarzenegger (http://www.cta.org/News/2005/20050809_1.htm) over the now $3.1 billion owed for both the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 school years, based on the original $2 billion “borrowed” from Proposition 98 funds.
A call to CTA this past week brought the frustrating information that there is nothing new to report regarding the status of this suit and that it is not at a point where others can join in in support of it. Still, this suit is something to keep an eye on and be ready to jump into, because as we saw with the California Nurses Association lawsuit regarding nurse-patient staffing ratios, continued pressure at the legal level can work.
In addition to organizing to get more funding though, we need to know what kind of financial situation we’re actually in. It’s insufficient to just ask for more. How much is more? How feasible will it be to get popular and legislative support for an unspecified amount or an amount not tied to well-specified needs?
Two approaches are available to address this. The first is at the local level. Many questions regarding our district finances came to the fore during the SFUSD-790 labor dispute. For instance, confusion exists regarding whether the amount of reserve funds the district has set aside is in excess of state requirements. This item and others need to be addressed as they will no doubt come up again in negotiations with teachers. As well, unanswered questions of this sort will impede our ability to build support for a parcel tax, when we get to that point.
The second approach is at the state level. There we need to identify what the real costs of our state education program would be if it were fully supported. Just last week the federal government agreed to a pilot program allowing for flexible, school-specific goals (as opposed to the rigid No Child Left Behind (NCLB) uniform targets) and California is hoping to be a part of it. This is an excellent opportunity to partially break out of the NCLB nightmare and we should make the most of it by taking our standards seriously.
If our curriculum standards are more than just a joke, then some resources will have to be put behind them to make them achievable. It’s time that we find out what kind of resources we need, so that we can procure them for all California students, not just those from areas rich enough in money and political organizing abilities to scrape them up locally.
The entity to do this already exists -the California Quality Education Commission (http://www.schoolfunding.info/states/ca/QEM-Bill.htm). Unfortunately, it was put into deep freeze by Governor Schwarzenegger’s refusal to appoint people to it. But with the momentum of the special elections behind us, this may be just the time to demand that this body be resuscitated, so that we can look at how to address our education needs in a realistic and responsible way. Email your state representatives today and urge them to put the pressure on to get the Quality Education Commission to work.
Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is the president of the board of directors of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (http://www.ppssf.org).
