By: SAUSD Trustee Cecilia Iglesias
Just want to share on what is happening in SAUSD as I was rudely stopped from sharing during today’s Board meeting.
Confronting a financial DISASTER they helped create, teachers union leaders did today what they’ve done for years: They blamed someone else. And of course they blamed me.
Barbara Pearson the Teacher’s Union President sent her President’s newsletter to teachers blaming me for declining enrollment in the district’s schools.
If you are an SAUSD Teacher, you may have seen the March 2017 Newsletter. It suggests that my work to provide parents with alternatives to school choice to under-performing schools led to an exodus of Students from district schools.
But enrollment has been declining since 2002. I was First Elected in 2012. I first received the documents in March 2015, in a meeting, where our Assistant Superintendent of Facilities provided us –the Facilities Master Plan, a document showing that the number of students in our district had been falling since 2002 and would continue to decline in the future. The projection covered thru FY2017-2018 to 49,527 total student enrollment.
Despite that long-term decline, teacher’s union leaders, Susan Mercer and Barbara Pearson lobbied for higher teacher pay every year. Understand that: in any other business, a decline in customers would lead to cost-savings measures. But not here in Santa Ana Unified. Since 2015, union leaders have worked overtime to sell their members and my colleagues a MYTH – that teacher pay can continue to rise even as the student population and revenue decline.
Three times in three years, union leaders Susan Mercer and Barbara Pearson told their members and my fellow trustees that teacher pay could rise every year. Every year, my fellow trustees took the path of least resistance. They caved to Mercer and Pearson. In the end, over three years, teacher salaries went up 16 percent.
That was financially unsustainable. And tonight, we reached the dead end of that logic – the place where rising teacher pay and declining student enrollment collide with mathematical reality. Which translates to roughly $32 million in pay increase and $55 Million in retirement increase on the backs of taxpayers. Today our Superintendent informed us that the potential layoff of the 287 staff, translates to $28 Million in cost saving to our budget. We could have saved everyone’s job. But as always, the Teacher’s Union thought about their pockets and didn’t protect their members.
The mathematical reality means that new teachers – the youngest teachers in our district – will be terminated to ensure SAUSD does not go into a negative certification by the County Department of Education. It means that our students will be put into larger class sizes. And it means that our remaining teachers will shoulder the additional work of those larger classes.
Let me be clear: The newest teachers won’t be terminated because they’re bad teachers. They’ll be terminated only because they’re new – because the same union leaders who led our teachers into a dead end also insisted that the last teachers hired would be the first OUT in a financial calamity. This is referred to as Last In First Out (LIFO).
I want to say something to those 287 teachers who may be laid off: I’m sorry!! You no doubt started your work at SAUSD with great enthusiasm for the mission of educating Santa Ana’s young minds. You likely knew the challenges and rewards of working for SAUSD, but you just as likely celebrated your career with calls to friends and family that you were ready to Teach our young minds with energy, courage and creativity.
I think about those phone calls and celebrations tonight with sadness. You had no reason to expect that the Leaders of your own union would BETRAY you. But they did!!! And you had every reason to expect that this school board would protect you from the Teachers’ Union leadership’s destructive and single-minded push for higher wages. But they didn’t!!!
The union leadership’s chokehold on the School Board members – the destructive influence of union money poured into the political campaigns of my fellow trustees – confused my colleagues. They came to believe that they owed their positions to union leaders rather than to the education of our children, protecting great teachers and serving our families.
You deserved better! Our students and our families deserved better!!
Please know that I stand with Great Teachers and with our parents and students. I will stand up to the Bullies of the Teacher’s Union Bosses, Barbara Pearson and Susan Mercer and will not cave to their scare tactics of placing blame on others when they find themselves having to answer why Great Teachers are being laid off and Our Students will be short changed from the resources that were rightfully due to them.
If you would like to continue to be informed on Transparency on Public Education please connect with the Santa Ana Parent Union group.
In all seriousness, I just wish you would be reasonable about addressing issues like this rather than going off on the stream of consciousness rants. Good bye newsantana “news” blog. Perhaps it’s time we start something that is more deserving for our city.
Please do. You will soon find out that while I make it look easy blogging is not in fact easy. And it is a major time commitment. Good luck.
Same thing happening a bit north of Santa Ana: a “job action” last year with daily pickets, declining enrollment (people scared off by the protest), teachers who care less about the students…
90% of the budget goes to pensions and salaries, 10% to supplies and facilities. Public schools are in for a rude awakening.
Enough, Ceci. You’ve done nothing for any teachers! Have some shame. Teachers had gone for years in the district without raises! All you do is bloat your already-bloated ego (not to mention physique) on the victories you have of “school choice.”
So how is that raise working out for the soon to be fired teachers?
#fakenews
Really? Those pending pink slips won’t be fake will they?
Stupid article
If anything that raise was a stupid idea!
8 years without raises! You try living that way with the continuing increased cost of living.
Tenured teachers do quite well Shaw, as you know. And they don’t work all year like the rest of us do. The raises screwed almost 300 mostly new teachers. If you keep screwing the new teachers how are you going to replace yourselves when you folks start to retire?
BTW most Santa Ana residents have to work more than one job to make ends meet. And you guys already make 2-4 times as much as the average Santa Ana resident whose taxes pay for your salaries.
Aren’t the teachers working more days than before? That raise paid for their extra days…..so adjust the calendar back and save some of these teachers. Be professional and problem solve this Ms. Vargas. Please stop the ridiculing.
I’m just curious who her ghost writer was because everything is spelled correctly. Additionally, this is the first nice thing she has ever said about teachers. As an advocate for school choice, she should not just be pushing charters, but maybe visiting SAUSD schools to see what they are doing and for more than the purpose of a photo op.
If you follow Ceci on Facebook you will see that she does indeed visit the schools regularly.
Ceci loves the teachers. Their union leaders on the other hand are hard to love. You can certainly argue that they have been bungling things for years. The teachers ought to vote them all out of office.