The Reality of
Putting Students and Teachers First
Schools in California must confront a new reality. Last
year, California issued teaching credentials to only 11,497 new teachers.
Meanwhile, teachers began to leave the profession in record numbers, heading
off into retirement and into more highly-paid professions. Over the next ten
years, California schools will lose one third of its teachers to retirement,
and currently there will not be enough qualified professionals to replace them.
In this new reality, teachers do not compete for the best
positions; school districts compete in recruiting the best teachers. Many
districts have reacted by significantly increasing pay and even offering hiring
bonuses. However, this has not been the case for the Orcutt Union School
District. Right now, the average teacher could walk to a school just a
few blocks away and make at least $8,000 more per year. In fact, some of
our best teachers have already done so and have become the favorite teachers of
children in surrounding school districts instead of in ours.
Our school board has thrown up its hands when facing this
problem, claiming it does not have the money to offer competitive
salaries. The result has meant an increasing turnover rate, an increasing
amount of first-year teachers, and an increasing amount of teachers who have
emergency credentials. We represent these teachers and believe they have
great potential, but it will be increasingly hard to run successful schools
that are made up of a higher percentage of staff who are new to the profession
and new to the area. The people who are going to suffer the most are your
children who are taught in a district on its way to becoming a farm league for
other districts that offer attractive salaries.
Since 2013, over half of our high school teachers have left for other
districts. Some of those teachers were
the very reason that students were attracted to OA in the first place.
As a union, we do not believe this district has done the real
soul searching necessary to solve the problem. They claim poverty but
spend hundreds of thousands on German-engineered furniture and millions on
iPads and MacBooks that only make their way into the hands of a few select
students. Increasingly, the district spends on what is flashy, new, and
disposable without investing in the highly-educated and durable teaching force
that running a high-performing school district really requires.
When confronted, the district frequently points to numbers and
suggests that working towards offering teachers a competitive salary will mean
layoffs, increased class size, reduced art and PE programs, reduced resources,
and decreases to site maintenance. Indeed, the district’s letter asks
Orcutt residents to believe that Orcutt teachers are a greedy, selfish group
that is willing to sacrifice the solvency of the district and the quality of
education provided to district students in favor of short-term, personal gain. The
claim that teachers would see the destruction of the students and the schools
that they helped to build and work tirelessly to preserve is not only false,
it’s divisive and it’s dangerous. It
speaks to the district’s view that teachers are a self-interested workforce to
be managed, not the reason for its robust educational programs and
success. It should not be up to the
teachers to force the school board to put its spending priorities in the
correct order, but we will if we have to.
The district is correct in saying that “your students’ educational
success is not at risk” because there is a dedicated and determined staff to
make sure that this district has a successful future.
When the district claims that offering a competitive salary
schedule will break the solvency of the district and result in cuts to programs
across the board, the district’s numbers don’t add up, and are sometimes
outright incorrect.
According to the district’s letter, it spends “approximately 45%
of the total budget” on certificated salaries, including the 2015/16 school
year. It does not. According to
the Second Interim Report (the most recent data released from the district),
less than 39% of the budget is being spent on certificated salaries this school
year. Any elementary student in Orcutt can tell you that’s a difference
of 6%: 39% is not 45%. In truth, the last time that teacher
salaries made up 45% of the budget was in 2012/13, and it has declined every
year since, while the budget has increased every year since. The money
keeps going up, but the portion of it that teachers receive keeps going
down. Simply stated, the value that the district places on teachers gets
less every year.
If the district was to do what it claims—what it has the
capability of doing—and spent 45% of its budget on certificated salaries, it
would have to give Orcutt teachers a 15.3% raise to meet that figure. So
in light of the districts own intention and ability to provide a 15.3% increase
to teachers’ salaries, the 9.5% that the union is requesting is more than
fair. There is no chance that a 9.5% raise would cause any risk at all to
your child’s educational success; it would not threaten programs or class size
or facilities in any way. What it would
do, however, is mitigate the wage gap and be a step towards ensuring that
Orcutt students are provided with the best teaching staff possible.
It is the duty of the school board to attract and retain a
highly-qualified teaching staff that will, in turn, create the dynamic and
successful educational programs that Orcutt residents have come to expect from
its teachers and its schools. No one is
going to move into the Orcutt Union School District because of its furniture;
they move here because of its teachers. Surely, the district’s spending
priorities should put teachers at the top, but over the last few years, while
there has been an increase in the percentage of the budget spent on consultant
fees, administrative salaries, technology, and furniture, the percentage spent
on teacher salaries keeps going down. Teachers and students are literally
not being put first in Orcutt Union School District, despite what the slogan
says.
Orcutt Educators’ Association
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