Every dollar we spend on unsustainable benefits for teachers is a dollar we deny our kids

Growing up, my Polish grandma would fuss over us kids as she served up dinner. When we asked her to eat with us at her modest table, she would demur, waiting for us to have our fill before she’d eat.

Grandma’s example, of putting kids first, could be applicable to the kids enrolled in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

At SCUSD, our students are majority nonwhite and majority low-income. Around five hundred are homeless. Even before COVID, fewer than half our graduates qualified as “prepared” for college or a career. After two COVID-ravaged years, our kids’ needs are greater than ever. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control just reported a shocking 55% of teens experienced emotional abuse at home in 2021.

Our entire district remains stressed. Teachers and staff have endured distance learning, COVID protocols, and staffing shortages that were especially acute last winter. They deserve our boundless love and gratitude, as well as extra pay.

As part of an agreement to end the 8-day teachers’ strike and get kids back in school last week, SCUSD will spend millions more on one-time bonuses and ongoing raises while maintaining generous benefits. SCUSD’s salaries and benefits for teachers are already ranked among the highest in the region, and salaries and benefits already account for 93% of the unrestricted General Fund budget.

An organization’s budget reflects its priorities, and our district prioritizes its employees.

My question to all of us is: How can we also meet the needs of our kids?

Over decades, a parade of oversight agencies—the Sacramento County Office of Education, the State Auditor, and the state Fiscal Crisis Management and Assistance Team, or FCMAT has slammed the district for making ongoing salary and benefit commitments it couldn’t afford.

All have noted the high cost of employee health benefits, in particular. It’s essential that the district maintain competitive salaries and benefits, but equally important to realize just how extreme an outlier the benefit costs are, compared with similar districts and public employers statewide.

Because salary and benefits are contractually guaranteed regardless of available revenues, they threaten the district’s solvency when money gets tight.

Even beyond threats of insolvency and receivership, we need to understand that higher salary and benefit compensation come with tradeoffs.

Public education is inadequately funded overall, but until we fix that, we have hard choices about how we spend limited resources to serve children. Unfortunately, these tradeoffs and the underlying budget math are ignored in adult-focused and emotionally driven conversations, especially when our community is besieged by a strike and awash in bumper-sticker slogans, misinformation, and vitriol.

Our teachers and staff are awesome. They absolutely deserve fair and competitive compensation. As we move forward, we should also be honest that every additional dollar promised for compensation is a dollar unavailable to improve opportunities for kids in other ways.

Per state law, our community-informed Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) is meant to guide the spending of our flexible state dollars on kids who need it most. But if employees refuse to serve children until we commit more dollars to salary and benefits, that student-centered budget planning steps meekly aside.

Throughout the strike, I heard little about our kids aside from the assertion that withholding education from them was ultimately meant to serve their interests.

Putting resources into science-based reading instruction to address shocking disparities in literacy, expanding arts and sports programs, and rethinking our system to meet our goal of reaching a 100% graduation rate that leaves none of our students behind were not a focus of discussion during the recent strike.

These things matter for our kids too. As school board trustees, it’s our job to advocate for their needs.

SCUSD is educating the diverse next generation of Sacramento workers, creatives, and leaders that desperately need every opportunity we can provide them.

We should be held accountable for smart budgeting and improving our kids’ lives, not just whether we can maintain labor peace. Maybe my grandma’s approach was old-school. But we could at least set aside a decent share for the kids, even as we take care of the deserving adults.