What if a union is too powerful? Meet the one dominating high-poverty Sacramento schools
Unlike SEIU Local 1000, the largest state employees union whose leaders are at war with themselves, the Sacramento City Teachers Association is incredibly unified.
The union that represents full-time and part-time teachers, substitutes, nurses, librarians, and social workers within the Sacramento City Unified School district is also very powerful – a proverbial whale in a small pond.
For well over 20 years SCTA has, with scorched-earth tactics, influenced policy within an urban, high-poverty school district to such an extent, it has often seemed that SCTA members are running the district.
This arrangement has been great for SCTA members but not for anyone else in the district. At SCUSD, the interests of adults are always put ahead of the interest of kids in a district where the majority of kids are Black and brown. This upside-down system is an outlier in the Sacramento region. At Elk Grove Unified, for example, the district and labor partners are not in love with each other, there is tension between them, yet the two sides work to put district kids first.
That hasn’t been possible at SCUSD for as long as anyone can remember.
The district is always framed as being “dysfunctional. ” As long as that turmoil has been the norm, one side has kept getting what it wants. And that’s SCTA.
It’s no coincidence that for the third time in four years, there is a threat of a strike at SCUSD by SCTA members
Mind you, SCTA members have the most generous health care plans of any school district in the region. They are 100% subsidized by the district. When combined with salaries, SCTA members have had the highest total compensation – an average of $106,797 per member – of any district in the region, according to figures compiled by School Services of California, a Sacramento-based education consulting and advocacy firm.
In a statement released last week, SCTA President David Fisher said this:
“Rather than work with us to address the staffing crisis and create an environment that would help to recruit and retain educators, Superintendent Jorge Aguilar blames teachers and other frontline staff for administrative failures that leave students and their families abandoned.
An easy rebuttal here is that districts across the Sacramento region, California, and the nation are facing bleak staffing shortages after COVID. But SCUSD is the only district in the region facing a strike over it.
Moreover, the district website lists numerous proposals from as far back as August of 2021 to pay teachers extra for volunteering to take on students’ independent study if their families were afraid to send them to school because of COVID. There was also a proposal to pay nurses more for taking on extra duties during COVID.
Aguilar said the district will have more than $100 million in reserves from state and federal funding but he doesn’t agree that those funds should be used to hire staff. Why? Because these are one-time funds. Once they are spent, they are gone. So what would happen if Aguilar used these funds to hire staff and then the money ran out and he couldn’t replace it?
He would have to lay off the same staff. And who would be the bad guy then? Aguilar.
Beyond that, it is the purview of the superintendent and the elected board to decide how one-time funds are spent. If you threaten to strike over that, when no other district faces such a threat despite being affected by staffing shortages, then you are saying you want to run the district.
Aguilar thinks that he and the elected board should run the district and he’s not wrong. It is his fiduciary responsibility and that of the board. In most districts, labor partners advocate for how policy affects members – but they don’t get to set policy.
But at SCUSD, they effectively do. For years, the district has been trying to have kids start school sooner in mid-August like most other school districts. But SCTA has blocked it. Common assessments of students is a valuable tool used in most districts, but it’s a point of contention of SCUSD.
Long before Aguilar arrived, a revolving door of superintendents and elected boards ceded more and more authority to SCTA.
Aguilar has tried to restore balance and for that, he gets labeled “Incompetent” by SCTA.
Stating the issues this plainly is hard for some people to hear because they love their teachers. I love my teachers. I’m a SCUSD parent and my teachers have been phenomenal.
I want them to get paid more but it’s not healthy for the district if their union leaders act as if they are co-superintendents with Aguilar. What SCUSD needs more than anything is cooperation. What the district can least afford right now is a strike after COVID has hung over the lives of our kids like a specter for three consecutive academic years.
There are teachers in the district who are tired of the constant fighting and want a reset. It’s up to them to elect union leadership that works to achieve that. That is not the case right now and it will never be the case as long as the current union leaders are in place.
And until that climate changes, students and parents at SCUSD will suffer.
This story was originally published March 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
