LANCASTER – Attempting to persuade district officials toward a fair settlement in contract negotiations, members of the Eastside Teachers Association held a spirited rally Monday evening outside the Eastside Union School District headquarters in Lancaster.
Teachers hoped their message would reach board members for the following day’s negotiations, but no settlement was reached at the mediated session on Tuesday.
Stephanie Price, president of the teachers association, said that negotiations with the district had reached an impasse over a demand that teachers add three days to their work year without receiving adequate compensation for the additional time.
“The district was looking for more work days, but what equates to our members as a pay cut,” Price said. “Most people when they are asked to work more hours are paid more for additional time, and the district does that for everyone else; but they don’t want to do it with us.”
The teachers association stated in a news release that the district’s final offer before Tuesday’s mediation session was barely competitive to neighboring districts without the additional proposed days.
“That the district’s priorities are wrong is exemplified by the fact that among comparable High Desert districts, Eastside ranks almost dead last in the budget percentage spent on teacher salaries, while they are in the top third of money spent on administrators,” the organization stated.
Mark E. Marshall, Ed.D., Superintendent of Schools for the Eastside Union School District, told The AV Times in an email on Wednesday that the district is offering teachers a 5 percent salary increase plus an additional 0.8 percent toward enhanced experience credit (up to 10 years of eligible experience).
“To address the issue of improving student achievement, the district is proposing three additional workdays, two for instruction and one for professional development,” Dr. Marshall said. “It should be noted that even with the exclusion of the proposed 0.8 percent boost for additional years of service, the proposed raise for ETA constitutes a 9.5 percent cumulative increase since Jan. 1, 2014.”
Price put the proposed pay increase offer into further perspective, saying that ETA teachers have had pay increases of about 9.22 percent over the past 10 years, while the cost of living has risen to about 23 percent.
“The district and administrators… they’ve gained about 33 percent (pay increase), and so they’ve not only kept up with the cost of living, but they’re ahead by almost 10 percent,” she said. “So there’s a little inequality there, and the taxpayers voted to raise their taxes so that it would come to teachers and students. And where is it? It’s in the administrator’s pockets.”
Among other issues being negotiated, Price said the teachers association is also seeking to reduce class size for the upper grades and middle school. “We think that’s an issue that parents, students and teachers all believe is important to everybody,” she said.
The district and the Eastside Teachers Association held its first mediated session on Tuesday with Gerald Adams, a labor dispute mediator for the State Mediation and Conciliation Service, which is a division of California’s Public Employment Relations Board. A second mediation session is slated for Nov. 30 at the district office.
“The district hopes to reach resolution on Nov. 30,” Dr. Marshall told The AV Times. “We are hopeful of resolving the impasse and reaching an agreement as soon as possible.”
According to its website, the Eastside Union School District is comprised of more than 300 employees and teaches nearly 3,450 students each day.
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Russ says
The $135,000 salary seems to confirm the point of these teachers because that is an administrator’s salary–not a teacher’s salary. It seems to be a double standard that blame is quickly thrown to teachers, but the ones directing the failure of this district are honored and praised. Where is the accountability for those highly paid administrators.
Eric says
Right there with the accountability for the parents. No one wants to take the blame, and all parties are responsible. ‘Merica, 2015.
All In says
Take a look at transparentcalifornia.com. The administrators’ salaries are there as well. The Eastside Administrators are some of the lowest paid in the Antelope Valley. You are correct. Get better paid and better qualified administrators.
Son of the Anti Rex says
at least these people get paid for doing work. we have a mayor that makes far more money suing VFW posts, school districts, businesses, and cities.
Frank Shaw says
Some of these teachers make upwards of $135,000 per year including benefits for 9 months of work. Many of the families of the children that they are teaching are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. According to one of the teachers, they should get an 18% increase to be made whole. I’m sorry, but I find it really hard to sympathize with their plight when they’re the highest paid teachers in the Antelope Valley and get the absolute worst results. Yeah. If they can do so much better elsewhere, maybe they should. Check out their individual salaries at transparentcalifornia.com. You will get a major education.
Katrinka says
Wrong. Look at the teachers salary schedule, the highest you can make after the equivalent of 8 years college is 88,000. That is your lifetime highest! Then you have to delete the amount taken from teacher paychecks for medical insurance. You can see the salary schedules of all the districts in our valley on each district’s website btw to verify.
Philip says
Frank Shaw,
Thank you for the link TRANSPARENTCALIFORNIA.COM
Everyone should see this website and get a major education. Check out the $250,000 salaries City of Lancaster is handing out. Ja-Ja-Ja-Jesus, man!
As for the Eastside Union School District Teachers, Russ (above) is correct. Those $135,000 figures are administrator salaries. The highest paid teachers do make (and deserve) salaries in the mid $85,000 range. And yes, one of them is a Kindergarten Teacher.
Ahem.
Let’s have a round of applause for Teachers…
Frank Shaw says
Sorry, my bad. The highest paid teacher makes $117,000 after benefits. And you’re right. A kindergarten teacher.
John says
Fair? I guess finding a better job somewhere else is out of the question.
I don’t blame the teachers for the district ranking in the lowest 10%. I blame the parents and the community.
William says
Well, John, now that you’ve blamed them………..then what?
I guess we’ll sit back and see what good that did.
George says
I belive in increased compensation for increased performance. Teachers on the Eastside of Lancaster should gladly work the extra three days just to get more time with those kids.
Eastside Lancaster schools rank in the lowest 10% of the State, as a whole. Not one person working within that district should see an increase until that changes.
Cynic says
This is a typical, ignorant statement coming from someone who knows nothing about the correlation between bad neighborhoods and school performance. These teachers would be considered exceptionally good if they were working in an affluent neighborhood with kids who have parents that are educated. Instead, we crucify them with comments like yours for being willing to take on a tough assignment. Maybe we should support these teachers instead.
Gotta Wonder.... says
Well Cynic, they have a similar population to other districts in the Valley, have higher pay, and yet get lower results. So if we pay them more, they’ll do better? Are they doing a crappy job now, but will do better if they get more money?
Please.
Michele says
I agree you should t be placing blame in the teachers. They show up each day and work hard and love what they are doing to teach these students. For a student to do well it takes a partnership between the parents, child and Teacher. If parents do not play an active part by making sure kids are doing homework, come to events at school, come to conferences, have dialogue with the teacher and set and enforce rules for their children they can’t expect the full responsibility of good grades on the teacher.
The majority of these teachers starting salary is less then what most corporations start their entry level employees with or without a degree. Some of these teachers have master degrees and still are paid much less.
They work much more than 9 months. They work weekends, nights and are really only off work the month of July since school ends in mid June and starts early for them the begging of August
Teachers love teaching your kids. They don’t like dealing with this political part of it. They want to teach and help their students do great at learning. They decided to teach because of this. They should get paid a respectable salary. They are teaching our future. This is the same future that will be taking care of us when we are much older.
It is not ok to give only raises to the district staff and administration in the schools and tell the teachers the only way you will get an increase is work more days. Than that is paying them for the days they are working not a raise to what they are making.
Tim Scott says
Teachers should love teaching kids. They should also be good at it.
The whole “could make more in the corporate world” line is lost on me, because most teachers I have known wouldn’t last five minutes there, so annual salary wouldn’t make any difference. “The kids aren’t respectful.” Let me clue you in, if you work in corporate America NO ONE is respectful, and the asshats you would encounter every other minute would make the kids in your class look like a church choir.
“We really only get July off, June doesn’t count because we work, like, half of it, so the month is shot.” Start your own business. You’ll make more money than teachers. I took off Christmas DAY, pretty much every year. Some years I couldn’t.
Just get back to work…before people figure out that there is some better way to educate kids. Because there almost certainly is.
Philip says
Most kids are respectful, and simply as a survival instinct, have to be, because the would be lost without mentors. They are smart enough to know they don’t know anything about how the real world works – how to fix and maintain the industrial world we live in.
As a former substitute teacher for the Palmdale School District, I can honestly say that many of the administrators, who are constantly covering their asses, are the source of the problem. They teach for the minimum required amount of years, get a Master’s in Administration and milk it, all the while treating Real Teachers like students, playing politics and deceiving the masses.
And before anyone calls me out for not being a “Real Teacher,” I beg you to teach Junior High. Of course, you would have to possess a college degree… so that in itself should scrape the bugs off the comment board.
Nope says
I think the retention rate is very low for teachers, so apparently quite a few do decide to move into other professions. Saying adults are disrespectful to each other in the business is frankly stupid. Businessmen, corporate types, are not a bunch of angry soul crushers. How is that good business on any level? I’ve never heard that the corporate world is like a room full of disrespectful 15 year olds except worse. I’ve worked in corporate finance and have not been told to F off and the like. I wonder where you’ve experienced this at?
Tim Scott says
Pretty much. So, are there a lot of things that you don’t know enough about to form an opinion? I suggest expanding your experiences.
All In says
Well, it certainly helps that Tim Scott’s opinion is correct.
Tim Scott says
LOL…like I am ever shy about putting my one and only screen name on what i think.
Gotta Wonder. says
So……do the teachers have any responsibility at all? None? They’re helpless victims in a world of poorly achieving children? That card has been played way too often. The thing that I see is that teachers don’t like to be accountable for their work.
Nope says
A fair number of these kids move to multiple schools in a year. It’s common in an area like that to have an almost entirely different class from the beginning to the end of the year. To simply say teachers are the main determinant is very ignorant. I had good teachers and bad teachers but it didn’t really matter because I came from a highly educated upper middle class family and was going to end up the same. Liberals and conservatives both want to pretend that there aren’t deeper issues that lead to a struggling student, so they blame a teacher. It’s a laughable ignoring of a much larger and expensive to fix societal problem. If a child is a poor minority in a bad neighborhood with no parental involvement being raised by a grandmother on social security and has older siblings that dropped out and are involved in criminal activity, would you blame his 9th grade algebra teacher if he struggles on a state math test? Ridiculous.
Oscar Mejia says
Thank you fro this Article Jim E. Winburn.
Oscar Mejia