Your kid’s future is on the school board ballot, and unions are paying to have their way with it
Have you heard of former state Sen. Al Rodda? He was from Sacramento, went to Sac High, and was a major player in the creation of the California Railroad Museum. Today, two buildings are named after him at Sacramento City College.
Rodda died in 2010, but In 1976, it was his bill – SB 160, the Rodda Act – that cemented the right of collective bargaining for public school teachers in California. It recognized employee unions to bargain for teachers and classified staff. It created impasse procedures and the arbitration of grievances.
I often think of Rodda when I get labeled “anti-teacher ” by leaders of the Sacramento City Teachers Association. Am I getting called “anti-teacher” because I am trying to roll back the Rodda Act? No. It’s bedrock California law that is not up for debate or repeal by me or anyone else.
No, I get labeled “anti-teacher” by stalwarts of SCTA because I call them out for not bargaining. Right now, they are doing the opposite of bargaining.
The political action committee for SCTA has teamed up with the California Teachers Association to spend more than a half million dollars on four Sacramento City Unified School board races in an aggressive attempt to buy a board majority and virtually control the district.
You read that correctly. SCTA and CTA are spending more than a half million dollars to win four seats on the local school board. If they are successful, they would own their side of the bargaining table and have a dominant, if not controlling, voice on the side that is supposed to operate with some semblance of objectivity.
So why am I anti-teacher according to the hardest hard liners of SCTA? Because as a district parent myself, and as an opinion journalist, I believe that the answer to tough negotiations is not to out-buy the opposition.
I believe that the answer to confronting the hard work of fixing SCUSD is not to hire people elected with your money to replace experienced board members that you find inconvenient.
Who’s running?
That’s what SCTA and CTA are doing by trying to take out SCUSD board chair Jessie Ryan and board member Christina Pritchett
Ryan and Pritchett, who both understand the financial and political complexities facing the district, are being obscenely outspent by the SCTA and CTA patrons of Lavinia Phillips and Jose Navarro. Phillips is running against Ryan in Oak Park and Navarro is running against Pritchett in northeast Sacramento.
So why am I not supporting Navarro, who is of Mexican ancestry, like me, and whose father was a farm worker, like my parents were? Why am I not supporting Phillips, who is a Black woman? And yes, there are no Black women or men on the current SCUSD board.
My opposition begins with Navarro’s interview with The Bee editorial board. I could describe it as a train wreck except that would be understating it.
As The Bee editorial board wrote in its endorsement of Pritchett: “In his interview with The Bee, Navarro was shockingly oblivious about core issues. He said he had not reviewed the series of independent audits showing the district has a substantial structural deficit. At one point, he claimed the audits had not been public. This is false.”
But it got better: “The Bee has published multiple stories about the audits and the audits themselves are available on SCUSD’s website.... SCTA’s political action committee, along with the California Teachers Association and another labor group, has poured more than $160,000 into his campaign. That these organizations would commit that much money to a candidate as ill-prepared as Navarro says a lot, little of it positive. If they are going to hire an actor to run for the school board, they should at least instruct him to learn his lines.”
And wouldn’t you know that the day after Navarro’s interview, Phillips didn’t bother to show up for her Bee endorsement meeting? She has also blown off forums organized by parents. Meanwhile, the SCTA PAC and CTA have spent more than $200,000 on her campaign.
So, to people who have not yet voted: Votes for Navarro and Phillips are not votes for diversity. They are votes for SCTA and CTA.
These candidates haven’t done the work, they would not have viable campaigns without union money and they are incidental messengers in their campaigns. The multiple campaign fliers mailed on their behalf are a series of talking points that SCTA hardliners repeat instead of negotiating with the district.
Though she is more prepared than Navarro and Phillips, Nailah Pope-Harden – the SCTA candidate in the Fruitridge/Elder Creek area – did not get The Bee endorsement either. Her opponent, Jamee Villa, was more prepared and more independent. Pope-Harden has also received more than $100,000 from the unions and just doesn’t seem like she would be independent enough from her benefactors.
The Bee did endorse Chinua Rhodes, the SCTA candidate from south Sacramento, because he had been campaigning for a year. He knows the issues, didn’t get nearly as much money from the unions and he didn’t really need them. If Rhodes wins, he will become the only Black member of the school board. Unlike Navarro, Phillips and Pope-Harden, Rhodes actually has kids in SCUSD schools right now. So does his worthy opponent, Vanessa Areiza King. So does Ryan.
Buying candidates
So is it anti-teacher to want school board members to be independent from the money wielded by the teachers unions?
No.
No matter your politics, there should be a strong community response against vested interests seeking to buy an election by financing candidates who either can’t answer basic community questions or duck them altogether.
If Sen. Rodda were around today, I would say to him, “Senator. I’m not trying to undo your law. What I’m talking about here is a teachers union that doesn’t just want to represent its members. It wants to run the district by buying four seats on the board of SCUSD. That’s a problem.’
This isn’t the first time that SCTA has disregarded the bargaining process to use brute force. Remember in 2017, when SCTA threatened to strike for higher wages? It was in collective bargaining that time with the district that Rodda helped set up. The problem was: SCTA didn’t like the recommendations made by the state mediator. So instead of using the mediator proposals to reach a compromise with the district, it badmouthed the mediation document, chucked it aside the day after it was published and set a strike date.
They got their raises. SCUSD teachers are the highest paid in the region. They have the most expensive health care of any teachers in the region. Since 2003, state auditors have been warning SCUSD that if it doesn’t control health care costs, it will eventually run out of money.
For more than a decade, the Sacramento County Office of Education has been warning the district about its health care costs. In 2019, state auditor Elaine Howle warned the district about its health care costs and recommended that all employees take small pay cuts and move all employees into the one health care pool that is far less expensive for the district to cover.
Do SCTA hardliners want to talk about any of this stuff? Don’t judge their words, judge their actions. They disregarded the state mediator in 2017 who warned them about their health care costs and called for a strike instead of returning to their bargaining table.
They are disregarding the county and the state now by putting a ton of money on controlling the school board.
Is the district perfect? No. Is Superintendent Jorge Aguilar perfect? Is the current school board perfect? No.
But they are trying to deal with the district’s structural debt. They are trying to avoid large cuts to programs for kids by heeding years of recommendations that past superintendents and past school boards ignored.
It’s easy to understand why past school boards and superintendents ignored recommendations from the county and the state on controlling health care costs. Look what happens when you try: SCTA and CTA are running candidates to take out the leadership of the current school board and, if they succeed, Aguilar is sure to follow..
I wish Rodda were around today. Maybe he could do what no politician in this area has the guts to do: Tell SCTA and CTA to bargain with the rights he secured for them instead of tossing those rights aside to buy and bully when they don’t like what they hear.
This story was originally published October 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
