The union picked on an affluent school and paid the price. But what about ones without clout?
People often wonder why the culture within the Sacramento City Unified School District is so relentlessly toxic. As if on cue, one of the district’s labor partners crossed about 27 lines of appropriate behavior and got pummeled for it last week when the union angered the wrong parents, at the wrong school.
In doing so, a ridiculously egregious situation demonstrated the wide divide between which parents and students get heard and which don’t. It demonstrated that affluent parents look out for their affluent kids at SCUSD. But the majority of kids in the district – Black, brown, Asian, homeless kids living at the poverty line or below – are not so lucky.
Before we get to how inequality plays out at SCUSD, let’s focus on the outrageous union blunder that illustrates the whole mess.
With labor negotiations for their members to return to work stalled, the Service Employees Union Local 1021 posted a video insinuating it was dangerous for kids, and everyone else, to return to their campuses in the SCUSD. Mind you: This is after kids have been separated from their friends and teachers for a year in COVID isolation.
To stoop this low, union leaders lifted a photo from the website of Phoebe Hearst Elementary School in East Sacramento and used it. The photo contained an image of a second girl standing with someone in a cute costume of a friendly dragon, the school mascot.
But they didn’t ask for permission to use the photo, which violated the rules contained in the Annual Parent and Student Rights Notification and Standards of Behavior Handbook published each year by SCUSD.
Even though the image of the girl in the video was blurred, community members at Phoebe Hearst easily identified her.
The SEIU 1021 video made an issue of the dragon “hugging children on their first day back.” They claimed the district “botched” the return to students at school sites.
Parents were shocked, the Phoebe Hearst community quickly and assertively called out the union for using a child as a prop to gain an upper hand in their negotiations with the district.
“It was full of lies and propaganda in my opinion,” parent Julia O’Brien told FOX40 last week. “I didn’t want to be a part of it and they didn’t ask me to use the photo of my daughter. It felt pretty violating, really, to have my daughter’s picture on this video.”
SEIU 1021 has 1,900 members in job categories such as teachers aides, bus drivers and food service workers, among others. Before backing off, the union had recently called for a strike and was being supported by the Sacramento City Teachers Association, the local teachers union.
Smear tactics
The district had reported five people testing positive and how it was dealing with the cases.
“The video then attempts to tie the COVID cases at several District schools during the first week of reopening to the District’s planning,” wrote SCUSD Superintendent Jorge Aguilar to the SEIU 1021 leadership April 18. “None of the five COVID cases that were reported the first week our schools reopened were cases where COVID was contracted at our school sites...There has not been an ‘outbreak’ of COVID at any District school site or in the District and for SEIU to claim otherwise is misleading.”
By last week, SEIU 1021 officials had told Fox 40 that the video had been taken down.
Affluent and white gets heard
End of story, right? No. There is a much bigger story here that always gets buried when locals lie to themselves about how “progressive” Sacramento is.
It’s really not.
The reason that SEIU 1021 backed off and slunk away here was because they messed with the wrong school.
Seventy percent of the more than 40,000 SCUSD students are kids of color – and 70% of kids qualify for free and reduced lunches. But Phoebe Hearst is an exception. It’s in affluent East Sacramento.
At Phoebe Hearst, white students are in the majority – 50.1% of the student population. Black students make up less than 3% of the student population at Hearst; Asians make up less than 9%; and Latinos less than 24%. English learners make up a tiny fraction, less than 1% of Hearst students. Foster youth and homeless students are listed at 0%, according to district statistics.
More than enough parents at Hearst are affluent or connected or both, and they clearly showed that they do not tolerate anyone messing with their kids – and good for them.
Minority kids still hurt
But what about the majority of SCUSD kids whose parents are not connected or affluent? In other words, what about the majority of kids in the public school system bearing the name of Sacramento?
Less than a four-mile drive from Phoebe Hearst Elementary School is Oak Ridge Elementary School in Oak Park. where students lead much different lives.
At Oak Ridge Elementary, Latino students make up nearly 60% of the school population. White students are less than 3%; Black students, roughly 14%; and Asian students a little more than 15%. About 30% of Oak Ridge kids are English learners. Nearly 10% of the kids have disabilities and more than 2% are homeless.
The reason that the tactics of SEIU 1021 and SCTA are damaging isn’t because they hurt kids at Phoebe Hearst or the handful of other affluent public schools within SCUSD. Parents at these schools have the means to help raise funds and provide trips and other learning opportunities.
These kids, including my kids, are doing fine.
But a corrosive culture within the district does hurt kids like those at Oak Ridge Elementary – Latino kids, Black kids, Asian kids, disabled kids, homeless kids. Parents at those schools don’t have the means to raise funds to make up for experiences that the district can’t afford to provide. So the kids go without.
It gets even worse when the discussion turns to student outcomes. As The Bee editorial board wrote last year: “Before the pandemic, we knew white students and students of color at SCUSD had unequal school careers. More than 60% of white students met or exceeded the standard in English, while less than 50% for Asian students did, less than 40% for Latinos did and less than 30% of Blacks did. There are also gaps in math.”
The district won’t be able to invest enough to improve the student outcomes for all kids until it closes its structural budget deficit. The district won’t be able to close its deficit until it controls its health care costs to teachers, which are the highest in the region and among the highest in the state. The Sacramento County Office of Education has been telling SCUSD this for years. So have two different state auditors.
Aguilar and his elected school board are actually trying to follow the recommendations of county and state auditors to fix the district financially. This is why tension exists between the district and SCTA.
The teachers union doesn’t want to talk about renegotiating health care plans that are the highest in the region and rival those of schools in Silicon Valley. SCUSD teachers are also the highest paid in the region.
So how does this tension play out?
With constant negative messaging from SCTA and, now, SEIU 1021. And with the occasional publicity stunt to undermine confidence and confuse people so that the conversation never really gets to fixing the district’s finances. If Aguilar and his board stopped trying to do the right thing, if they did what past boards did and just kicked the financial can down the road, their lives would be much easier.
Aguilar could be making way more money with no headaches as an academic at UC Merced. But he, and most of his board members, actually want to make the district financially sound and functional. Aguilar’s own children attend SCUSD schools.
But the district stays dysfunctional because the supposedly progressive Sacramento community only stands up for kids when the kids in question are affluent kids at affluent schools. Otherwise, Sacramento gets lockjaw when these publicity stunts happen and the interests of adults trump the needs of Black, brown, Asian and homeless kids.
