School employees push for contracts

Protesters call for salary increases amid impasse with district

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Hundreds of members of the Long Beach School Employees Association and the Classroom Teachers Association picketed outside Long Beach Middle School before the Jan. 12 Board of Education meeting, protesting what they called a lack of progress in contract negotiations.

Nearly 1,000 employees have been working for the past 565 days under the terms of an expired agreement.

LBSEA members — bus drivers, maintenance workers, clerical staff, food service workers, teaching assistants, aides and custodial staff — have worked under the terms of expired contracts for parts of the past seven years, according to LBSEA President Joanne Rea, a district bus driver.

The last agreement — which was settled in the 2014-15 school year and covered the two preceding years — expired in June 2015.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult for any one of us to actually work for the district anymore,” Rea said, “because everything is going up around us — the cost of living — except our salaries.”

At the end of 2016, the school district and the LBSEA declared an impasse, and an independent mediator was brought in to help them reach a settlement.

“We live here. We’re your neighbors,” Rea said. “We love your kids as if they were our own. We’re not trying to get rich — none of us are. We just want to pay our bills like everyone else.”

The CTA and the school district declared an impasse last month. An independent mediator will be chosen in this instance as well to negotiate a settlement. CTA members have worked under the terms of expired contracts for parts of the past eight years, according to CTA President Keith Harvey.

“The goal is to have the school district come back to the table and settle a fair contract,” Harvey said.

School board trustees said that there are limitations on expenditures and salary increases because of the state tax cap. “The bulk of our revenue is from our tax levy, so our tax cap limits how much tax revenue you can bring in,” Schools Superintendent David Weiss said. “If you say there will be an increase in X amount of an expenditure to pay for salaries and benefits, that increase is constrained by how much revenue you have.”

About half of the district’s $135.5 million budget for the current school year covers staff salaries, and a significant portion also funds health and retirement benefits, according to the district’s chief operating officer, Michael DeVito.

But CTA and LBSEA officials contend that there is enough money in the budget to raise employees’ wages. “We understand that the district is operating under the tax cap, and believe that there are savings within the budget that would allow the teachers to be able to have a fair and equitable contract,” Harvey said. “Having an expired contract isn’t very good for the morale of the faculty. When there is an expired contract, there are no new salary increases.”