BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Two former Palo Alto school board members are warning of “immediate and traumatic” layoffs because of a new contract that gives teachers a 10.4% raise and $10,000 in bonuses.
“The brief good feeling of giving people what they want will quickly be replaced with the grim reality that hundreds of jobs will be lost and children’s education disrupted,” former board members Todd Collins and Ken Dauber said in a letter to the current board on Tuesday.
The tentative contract with teachers’ follows a May 27 deal to give employees who aren’t teachers a 10.2% raise.
Because of the contracts, the district’s $104.1 million in reserves will be depleted to $24.8 million by the end of next school year, Chief Business Officer Char-en Yu projected at a board meeting on June 2.
The Santa Clara County Office of Education requires the district to have a plan for sustaining its costs and maintaining reserves into the 2027-2028 school year, Yu said.
“The question is how the district will fund this ongoing obligation, year after year, while maintaining fiscal solvency,” Yu said, suggesting that layoffs are on the table.
Collins and Dauber opposed an $800 parcel tax that would’ve raised $14 million per year. They pointed to the district’s large reserves and declining enrollment.
The parcel tax was supported by 62.3% of voters, falling short of the two-thirds needed to pass on June 2.
“Even if they kept the parcel tax, these contracts would break the bank,” Collins said in an email yesterday.
Collins and Dauber urged the board not to approve the contracts.
“But if you do, let’s be very concrete and transparent about what you are doing: Making the largest compensation increase in PAUSD history … creating a budget deficit … diverting huge amounts of staff and community attention from our students to cost-cutting plans, job insecurity, and politics,” they wrote.
Instead, Collins and Dauber said the board should give modest raises to keep pace with inflation. They said the 10.4% raise actually comes out to 14.5% when increases for experience and education are factored in.
SF teachers got less
In comparison, the teachers’ union at the San Francisco Union School District reached a deal in February to get a 5% raise over two years.
Tom Culbertson, president of the Palo Alto teachers union, has said that past raises around 4% haven’t accounted for the Bay Area’s rising housing costs in the last decade.
“That has really eaten away at the buying power and living conditions of our members,” Culbertson said in a March interview.
Credibility questioned
Culbertson has questioned the credibility of Dauber and Collins because they were on the board as the number of administrators grew.
Dauber was on the board from 2014 to 2022, and Collins was on the board from 2016 to 2024.
Culbertson criticized Dauber and Collins for hiring and renewing the contract of Superintendent Don Aus-tin, who resigned on Feb. 20 with a $596,802 payout.
“They’re responsible, and maybe they should’ve taken a different path,” Culbertson said. “They were the trustees during most of what led us to this moment.”
Contentious negotiations
Culbertson and Acting Superintendent Herb Espiritu signed a tentative contract on June 4, two days after voters rejected the parcel tax.
The deal ended a year of contentious negotiations. Teachers said the district wasn’t valuing them, and the district said teachers were asking for too much. The union asked for a 17% raise over two years on March 23, and the district countered with 7%. The new contract gives teachers a retroactive 5% raise for the 2025-2026 school year and a 5.4% raise on July 1, plus a $5,000 bonus now and in December.
“This is a step in the right direction of the culture reset our members have been seeking,” Culbertson said after signing the deal.
New supe soon
The board is planning to hire a permanent superintendent on Tuesday. The finalist could be announced tomorrow when the meeting agenda is published.
“The last thing we want to do is put the new superintendent and board in a position where there are difficult financial decisions to make at the beginning of a new term,” board president Shounak Dharap said at the June 2 meeting.
Collins and Dauber agreed in their letter to the board.
“This will have to be the focus of your newly-hired superintendent over the next two years,” they said. “Your job is to preserve and protect the ability of the organization to focus on students, not to create unnecessary and harmful distractions.”
What teachers make
Starting teacher’s salaries would go from $91,546 to $101,067 in the new contract. The average salary would go from $130,072 to $143,599, and the top would go from $168,598 to $186,132, plus benefits and bonuses.
The district will continue covering 100% of health care for teachers and 90% for their family members.
“Our teachers deserve a contract that reflects the respect we have for them, and the board needs to make hard decisions to safeguard our money for kids,” Dharap said in a statement. “Whatever financial challenges lie ahead, this agreement means we’ll weather them arm in arm.”
Dauber has a lot of bal…..for even being involved and having an opinion!!! Kenny and his wife are one of the main reasons PAUSD had to shell out 3.25 million to Colombo and that is a fact! Kenny was the board president when all the injustices to Colombo were done. On top of that, the failed district investigation was not done properly. It is a fact NO Title Nine Investigation, as mandated by federal law, was ever done, nothing at all. It’s incredible to see the huge ego this little, little man Kenny has. At least his wife has gone and crawled under a rock somewhere, she has been silent now for a few years and the world is a better place for it.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you want a 10% raise from a public agency, ask for a 28% one first
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Palo Alto school board’s decisions closely resemble those of the school board in Oakland.