Sacramento teachers, school staff are about to strike. What’s behind their labor dispute?

Teachers and classified staff in the Sacramento City Unified School District are planning to strike this week over a contract disagreement that has been brewing for months, if not years.

It’s complicated because the teachers union and the district are in talks over two separate contract issues.

One looks ahead to the teachers’ next contract. The current one expired on June 30, 2019. They’ve been working under the old agreement because COVID-19 interrupted their bargaining over their next contract.

That means longstanding salary and benefit discussion in the financially troubled district have been on pause since before the pandemic.

The second round of bargaining focuses only on COVID-19-related issues, such as pay incentives for taking on additional work during the pandemic and health protocol.

The looming strike centers on the COVID-19 disagreements, which are being negotiated as a reopener in the teachers’ expired contract.

The district declared an impasse in the COVID-19 bargaining in December, which led to an independent review of the disagreement by a panel on the California Public Employment Relations Board.

That three-person panel issued a report last week analyzing the union and district positions, and notably stated that teacher salaries and benefits are “clearly relevant to recruitment and retention of staff.”

“It is counter-intuitive to expect that proposals to shift healthcare costs to employees, or to freeze wages for several years, would help any employer recruit and retain staff,” read a footnote in the report.

The Sacramento City Teachers Association immediately said it endorsed the findings, which also included a recommendation for a cost-of-living raise for all educators.

“The school board wanted the fact-finder’s report, they got it,” SCTA President David Fisher said in a statement to The Sacramento Bee. “Now that it’s clear that the fact-finder agrees with SCTA’s overall approach while simultaneously addressing SCUSD interests, the District refuses to follow his recommendations. The fact-finder’s report provides a carefully-crafted recommendation to address the staffing crisis in SCUSD, by stating the obvious.”

The fact-finding panel member who represented the district, John Gray of School Services of California, wrote a response that sharply criticized the report. He said many of its recommendations exceeded the scope of COVID-19-related bargaining and veered into what he considered to be negotiations over the teachers next full contract.

For instance, Gray wrote: “I dissent with the recommendation of the Panel Chair regarding the recommended ongoing salary increases, not because I believe that hard-working teachers do not deserve additional compensation, but rather because discussions of compensation and benefits are part of the ongoing successor contract negotiations between the District and SCTA.”

Here are the main points in the fact-finding report:

Health and safety on campus

Sacramento City Unified and the union were largely on the same page to ensure the health and safety of staff and students on COVID-19 protocol, according to the report. They are bound to state COVID-19 guidelines, but the teachers union wants the district to apply a higher standard of protocols, including more physical distancing in the classroom.

The fact-finding chair recommended to adopt California Department of Public Health guidelines, which until recently recommend a space of 3 feet in the classroom.

The chair also recommended the district adopt the union’s proposal of paying COVID-19 sick leave retroactively for the months of October 2021 through December 2021. Gray dissented from the recommendation, noting that teachers who were required to quarantine already were eligible for unlimited leave.

The fact-finders did not recommend the district’s proposal to allow quarantined students to meet with their teachers online. Gray dissented from the labor board on that point, writing the proposal “would ensure continuity of instruction for District students while unable to attend school in-person and minimize the learning loss that occurs when students try to work through paper packets at home without teacher and/or peer support.”

The fact-finders supported a district proposal allowing quarantined teachers to meet with students via Zoom if the teachers feel able to work.

Short-term independent study

With the pandemic still upending day-to-day instruction, with no end in sight, the district and union must come to an agreement on how to navigate this new reality.

Sacramento City Unified proposed to require teachers to simultaneously teach quarantined students and students in-person. But the chair disagreed.

The chair did go with the district’s proposal to have quarantined teachers, “provide instruction remotely via Zoom to students in the classroom, while those students are supervised by a substitute, and that such teachers be compensated for additional time needed to prepare for such Zoom instruction.”

Long-term independent study

Hundreds of Sacramento City Unified students opted out of in-person schooling and enrolled in the district’s independent study program. But nearly 600 students are on the wait list, and the program has 14 teaching vacancies.

Teachers who work for Independent Study can return to a comparable position, says the district. But the fact-finding report sided with the union, which argued that staff had a right to return to their home schools.

Because of the staffing shortage, both the district and teachers union recommended that teachers volunteer to work for the program, receiving compensation for up to eight hours each week.

The fact-finding chair agreed with the district’s proposals to alleviate some of the teacher shortage by hiring training specialists to fill in vacancies and increasing substitute pay by 25%. The chair also recommended a 25% increase in pay for teachers who substitute during their prep period and special education teachers who accept additional students in their classrooms — both common scenarios happening throughout schools.

What do the district and union say about the report?

The teachers union bargaining team voted unanimously to concur with the fact-finder’s recommendations stating “it provides a carefully-reasoned pathway for the parties to follow to resolve the three issues that divide them.” Union leaders say that the report confirmed what they advocated for all along: better compensation and working conditions.

The Sacramento City Unified school board also called for “fair and competitive compensation.” In a public statement, they also said they need to consider how to maintain savings and a healthy reserve.

“For many years, our district has struggled to balance our budget,” read the statement. “This struggle this goes back decades over many past Boards of Education and superintendents. For too long, our district has committed to ongoing costs that are greater than ongoing revenues that our district receives from the state and federal governments.

The school board called for the SCTA and SEIU to return to the bargaining table and not to strike.

This story was originally published March 21, 2022 at 5:25 AM.