Shoreline Education Association Summary of Issue

Why have our members voted to take such drastic action? Hopefully this letter will help to explain, since we know that there is much confusion in our community as to why teachers are so upset.

Shoreline’s district administrators, in particular the Superintendent and her Cabinet, have apparently decided that they did not get enough money out of teachers, classified staff, and classrooms through our bargains, so they have decided to make radical changes to the way in which we balance classes and access overload support.

Historically, Shoreline has always (or at least as far back as the SEA Bargaining Team and Executive Board is aware) tried to balance classes, both in terms of numbers and in terms of class mix. There have been one or two exceptions over the course of the last few decades, but in both cases, classes were balanced again either that same year or the year following. This idea of balance in class creation may work slightly differently at different levels. At the elementary level, the process teachers go through in assigning students to classes for the following year involves balancing the number of students in each class, and balancing the class mix – the number of boys & girls, a comparable range of academic achievement, and other factors.

In all of our discussions about overload during bargaining, the district team NEVER indicated its intention to change this longstanding practice. What they did do is ask the SEA team to change a little-known provision that none of us were ever aware of being used. In the old Section 32.2.8 (now 32.2.9) of our Collective Bargaining Agreement, there was a provision that allowed for supplemental staff who provide .5 FTE or greater relief to a particular classroom to be counted when calculating overload triggers. The district proposed that we change this from .5 to .2. We asked if they knew of examples where the old language was being used, since we certainly didn’t know of any classes that were being staffed at 1.5 FTE, and they said no.

The SEA Team asked the district bargainers why they wanted to make this change, and they said that it would allow them to access Title II and I-728 funds to provide certificated relief to overloaded classrooms, thereby taking pressure off the general fund. When we asked how this would work, we were given a secondary example, very vague, that led us to believe that perhaps if there was a very large class with a lot of students on IEPs, a directed studies teacher could co-teach that class with the general ed. teacher. That would be an additional .2 FTE. We thought this sounded like a great idea that would benefit both students and teachers.

Now, what you should also know is that the district proposed this change during one of our mediation sessions. It was in the context of brainstorming cost savings, and they asked us not to take official notes, because they didn’t feel ‘safe’ with our team anymore. That leaves us in a ‘he said-she said’ position regarding the exchange of explanations at the table.

The SEA Bargaining Team wants you to know that the district bargainers NEVER explained their intended application of this language change to us. They did not mention their current ‘plan’ of an elementary application of this language change. They never explained (until Thursday, 9/20 during our ‘demand to bargain’ session) how the .2 would change class size calculations and overload triggers. They absolutely never – not even in our 137 brainstormed ideas of cost savings/increased revenue ideas – indicated any intent to depart from our longstanding past practice of balancing classes. In fact, they never talked about the implementation of this language at all. They implied that it would be an occasional, minor change that would affect a few classes here and there, and would generate minimal cost savings in the neighborhood of $40,000.

Now, they are using this language to wreak havoc on teachers and students by changing classes in the third or fourth week of school, all the while selling it to parents as a good thing. They are using it to avoid overload costs, which is putting our classified colleagues out of jobs and/or insurance coverage. Your bargaining team feels that they were misled, if not lied to, and that now they are saying that we knew about this all along, when we obviously did not. We would NEVER have agreed to this language change if we had had an inkling that this would be its application.

To make matters worse, the district is encouraging (we have even heard examples of pressuring) our members to request waivers, not only of current overload provisions, but of the language providing an additional .2 FTE to each overloaded classroom. This is language that the district bargaining team just proposed and agreed to a couple of weeks ago. Because this language is so new, many of our members are not even fully aware of what they are being asked to waive.

SEA members are always able to submit waiver requests, and we have an outlined process for those requests that has timelines and steps that must be followed. SEA’s Executive Board and Representative Council must carefully weight the effects of any contract waiver on the current year as well as consider the precedent of such waiver on the future application of our collective bargaining agreement.

If SEA were to decide to grant waivers of overload, or even of this new language in 32.2.9, we will have essentially told the district that they can ignore contract language and simply provide whatever support they see fit to overloaded classrooms and we will ‘make do.’ We will have sent the message that provisions in our contract may be virtually ignored in the interest of balancing the budget. Do we, as an association, really want to set that precedent? The district has now communicated to SEA that they have over $500,000 budgeted for overload costs (figures received 9/21/07); why are they asking our members to waive our overload provisions?!

The instructional implications of the district’s current actions are also profound. There is the here and now, and there is the future. While it is upsetting and drastic to move students at this present time, perhaps even more frightening is the prospect of being asked to design future classes that deliberately overload teachers of one class and keep classes just below the threshold for others. The net result could force teachers to load low-impact students into severely large classes and concentrate high-impact students in the smaller classes, thereby lowering the quality of education for all of our students. All this on top of reductions to our high impact and inclusion funds due to the district’s ‘take-backs’ in our contract settlement.

This is not good instructional practice, and SEA members are outraged that our district administrators are portraying it as such.

So, what has SEA done so far to address our members concerns?

SEA leadership has met with district administrators to protest the moving of students, the departure from our longstanding past practice of balanced classes, and the misrepresentation of the district’s intended use of the language change in Section 32.2.9.

We have filed a grievance contesting the change to the longstanding district past practice of balancing classes. While there is nothing in our contract that specifically requires that classes be balanced, we are arguing that it is such an established practice that to change it would constitute a unilateral change in our working conditions and would be in violation of our maintenance of standards clause (Section 5.1).

We have filed a Demand to Bargain because there was NOT a ‘meeting of the minds’ regarding the intent of the language change in 32.2.9. Our bargaining team was misled and is demanding a return to the old language. This is called a recission. The district bargaining team has refused to rescind this section, and so we are filing an Unfair Labor Practice charge against the district for bad faith bargaining.

We have been consulting with WEA Advocacy on our grievance and WEA Legal on our Unfair Labor Practice charge. (Often called a ULP.) Both will take time, but we believe they are important to pursue. Neither will be easy to win – in fact, they will likely be challenging. But if we were successful they could prevent this from happening again in future years.

And of course, you, SEA members, have now taken action, as well. Your vote of no-confidence in the Superintendent and her Cabinet clearly shows that we no longer trust this administration to make educationally sound decisions that put students first. Your decision to strike on Thursday signals our collective intent to engage our community and urge them to join us in forcing the district to abandon this instructionally irresponsible plan, to honor our contract language in its intent, and to show that it clearly values instructional best practice and educational excellence. This may be an effort that is begun on Thursday and continues into the future, we will have to see. Clearly, we are still united, and we are still fighting for the future of Shoreline Schools.

In solidarity,
Elizabeth Beck
Co-president of the Shoreline Education Association