BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
The teachers’ union wants the Palo Alto school district to audit its spending on administrators and consultants before considering any budget cuts affecting classroom instruction.
Union president Tom Culbertson said state law requires districts spend at least 55% of their budget on teacher salaries and benefits, and Palo Alto currently spends 57.9%.
“It’s the other side of the equation that has gone out of balance,” Culbertson said in an interview on Wednesday.
Culbertson is pushing back on a narrative that the district’s new contract with labor unions is to blame for a proposed $33 million in budget cuts next school year.
The board agreed to give employees a 10.4% raise over two years and $10,000 in bonuses in June.
Board member Shounak Dharap said the board approved the contracts to avoid a strike as a new superintendent came in.
“We’re going to have to fire people,” Dharap said at a board meeting on Aug. 18. Culbertson said Dharap’s comments were premature and not helpful.
“We’re right at the beginning of a pretty long and dramatic process,” Culbertson said yesterday. “And I think that agitating people’s emotions right at the beginning — educators, the community, everyone’s emotions — is not really a good strategy. I have a feeling he would take those words back if given the chance.”
Superintendent Jason Glass said the district will try to avoid layoffs by not filling positions and reassigning employees.
“These conversations are going to make people scared and angry. We have to have them anyway,” Glass said at his first board meeting.
The cuts have already reached the district office as Glass has decided not to fill some administrative positions, saving $748,282 on salaries.
Culbertson said he loved the move because it’s proactive and shows a huge difference from the eight-year tenure of former Superintendent Don Austin, who added administrators as student enrollment declined
“The reality is we have (declining) enrollment and an infrastructure that is built for a lot more students… This was going to happen eventually,” Culbertson said.
One of the things that Dharap is correct about is that the new contract puts the board in the driver’s seat until the union can threaten to strike again. And the union is correct that there are too many administrators and consultants and that those administrators and consultants are overpaid. Somewhere there should be room for compromise to keep the budget in balance.
Amazing that 42% of the school budget is wasted on non-teachers!
When I attended grammar school (kinder garden through 8th grade in the same building), we had 1 principal, 2 secretaries, 1 janitor, and 18 teachers. 82% teachers. Why the school administration BLOAT now days??
While I support the teachers’ union and agree that the district should scrutinize administrative and consulting expenditures, I have a fundamental question: Where was the union’s voice during the many years when Don Austin expanded spending and advanced policies that harmed students?
Take math placement as one example. For years, families raised concerns about the district’s practice of holding students back in middle and high school math. At the high school level, the district ultimately lost costly lawsuits over these policies. At the middle school level—where state law offered no protection—the district continued resisting fair placement tests. After years of delay, they adopted a WestEd assessment without board approval, spending more than a million dollars on a test designed primarily to limit advancement rather than support it.
Neighboring districts use nearly free assessments that advance roughly 35% of students to the next level. Our district spent over a million dollars on a test that advances fewer than 12%. To make matters worse, one of the district’s math leads involved in this process was a former WestEd employee.
So again: Where was the teachers’ union throughout these discussions? Teachers understand better than anyone how harmful it is to artificially hold students back and how difficult it is to teach classes with extreme variance in prior knowledge. Yet while students and parents repeatedly came to board meetings demonstrating how unfair these tests were, the union remained silent.
I’m sure this is only one example among many where the district overreached while the teachers’ union stood by as a spectator.
PAEA, the Palo Alto Educators Association, has no interest in students or parents. They and the CTA, the California Teachers Association, are open about only advocating for their members, and that usually manifests in the relentless pursuit of more money and benefits. It’s not a secret. However, the PAEA has notoriously been running by the weakest teachers around, they are not sending their best. I would be curious to know more about the election that resulted in Tom Culbertson as President of the PAEA, he was mid at best, average. Oddly, they have not had many teachers of color, especially Latino and Latina leaders in the PAEA, it seems to be an area to improve. Regardless, PAEA doesn’t dare enter the world of student achievement and safety, and usually they just dwell on money, money, money, and the perpetual lack of “morale” when they don’t get it. They got the money now, it’s a bad deal for taxpayers, it does nothing for student achievement or safety, and parents should not be fooled into thinking that the extra 10 large is going to filter down to their children. This was a bad deal. Blame the administrators who agreed to it, and the Board which approved it.
This makes me wonder how much the head of the CTA makes. Turns out CTA President David Goldberg gets an annual compensation package worth $421,984.