GILROY
– Due to impending mid-year cuts in public education funding,
teachers’ union and school district negotiators have agreed to hold
off talking about compensation and instead focus on several other
contract items up for review.
GILROY – Due to impending mid-year cuts in public education funding, teachers’ union and school district negotiators have agreed to hold off talking about compensation and instead focus on several other contract items up for review.
“There are a lot of different contractual items to talk about,” Superintendent Edwin Diaz said. “With the uncertainty of the state budget, there’s been an agreement to not talk about (salary) compensation until we get further information.”
The state legislature is slated to pass legislation as early as this month tweaking Gov. Gray Davis’ proposal to slice education funding by 3.66 percent across the board. The contract talks are ongoing amid a hiring freeze implemented by Diaz in December.
Currently on the table is the issue of how to compensate teachers for the hours they put in outside the classroom. Teachers are required, for instance, to spend a certain amount of time attending professional development seminars and staff meetings.
Diaz said a key issue involves how to make teachers a part of the decision-making processes carried out in staff meetings.
“Previously the district could call a meeting at any time during the day. Now we’re trying to do it after the instructional day. The question then turns to how you compensate teachers for that,” Diaz said.
Gilroy’s representative from the California Teachers Association could not be reached for comment before deadline.
The negotiations, which have been ongoing since last spring, have met with complications other than the state budget. Over the summer, three of the district’s four negotiators either left or took new positions in the district, meaning the GUSD bargaining team had to be rebuilt.
“The issues remain the same, but the dynamics of the meetings certainly change when you have a turnover like that,” GUSD Human Resources Director Linda Piceno said.
Piceno, a GUSD veteran, is in her first year of heading up the human resources department.
“It’s been a challenge, but it’s satisfying to know we can weather a health and welfare crisis,” she said.
The crisis emerged in the fall when a major health insurance provider, LifeGuard, for district employees announced it was headed for bankruptcy. GUSD switched its health coverage for 55 percent of its teachers to Blue Cross of California, but that company and another health insurance provider for the district have since increased rates by roughly 20 percent.
At a December school board meeting, Diaz warned trustees that it was no longer realistic for the district to pick up 100 percent of teachers’ health insurance premiums in future years. The district is covering 100 percent of the cost increases for this school year, an item agreed on in the contract talks this year.
GUSD teachers are in the final year of a three-year contract.
