This edition of the Notebook NEWSFLASH is also available online at: www.thenotebook.org/newsflash/2004/october
Notebook NEWSFLASH: October 2004
Teacher contract talks continue, imposition still looms
Voters encouraged to pull lever for education
Group seeks collaboration, emergency summit on safety
Events
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With the deadline for contract negotiations between the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and the School District of Philadelphia extended for the third time, to October 10, uncertainty about the outcome remains.
What is certain is that imposing a teachers’ contract – as threatened by School Reform Commission (SRC) Chairman James Nevels in comments late last month – is an approach that has caused disruption in communities and schools elsewhere in the country where teachers were confronted with similar action.
From a drop in student enrollment to dramatic declines in school activities to on-going labor unrest and teacher/district tensions, the fallout from imposed contracts continues to be felt in other communities.
“Frustration, stress, and anger are spreading throughout Wisconsin schools,” the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which represents 97,000 members in that state, noted on its website, in response to contracts imposed in 47 instances in that state since 2001.
Elsewhere, strained relations between teachers and the community of Middletown Township, N.J., continue in the aftermath of an imposed contract in 1998. Tensions erupted in an illegal 2001 strike that teachers took when faced with the threat of a yet another imposed contract there. The continuing conflict was the featured article in the September 29 edition of Education Week. Entitled “Bad Blood,” the article detailed how the 2001 strike led to the arrests of nearly 230 teachers, with at least one family of angry residents posting a yard sign that read, “Leave them in jail.”
The situation in Philadelphia has hardly generated such bitterness. But the absence of a contract has already taken a toll. Teacher vacancies numbered 156 on October 4, plus 31 part-time positions, according to the District’s website.
The PFT has blamed the spike in vacancies as compared to last year on resignations and retirements influenced by the uncertainty of the contract situation.
“Certainly, people want to take jobs where they know what their salaries and benefits are, and what the work rules are,” said PFT spokeswoman Barbara Goodman.
Trying to avoid imposition
The four-year contract that covers 21,000 PFT members,
including 11,300 teachers, expired August 31, but
was extended to September 10, then to September 30,
and most recently to October 10, in hopes of reaching
an agreement.
In interviews, both sides expressed optimism that an agreement could be reached.
At issue are teacher salaries, healthcare cost-cutting measures, and the length of the workday. But the most controversial element involves the School Reform Commission’s advocacy of site selection: shifting teacher hiring away from a system that allows teachers to transfer into schools of their choosing, with priority based on seniority. The School District would like to place hiring decisions in the hands of principals, but their proposals have raised hackles among teachers; the SRC’s plan turns over a number of school-based decision-making powers to principals.
Nevels said in late September that if the two sides had not reached an agreement by the end of September, the SRC would impose a contract on union members. Imposition of a contract by the SRC is allowed under Act 46, the state takeover law, and teacher strikes are forbidden.
Days before the September 30 deadline, Nevels expressed optimism about the talks and opened the door to another extension.
However, Nevels stressed that he stood by his desire to bring an end to unresolved contract issues, telling a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, “We can’t let this situation drag out indefinitely.”
PFT spokeswoman Goodman expressed hope for on-going negotiations and for the possibility of a resolution within days.
“No one wants an imposed contract,” she said in a phone interview.
Children’s advocate Shelly Yanoff, of Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth, agreed: “Imposition is bound to trigger a hostile reaction. Kids suffer in hostile environments.”
“It’s important to keep negotiating and to try to find the third way,” she added. “It seems to me that if you talked to the people on the street and the teachers in the classroom, most of the teachers and most of the administrators could identify a third way . . . if we could only get there.”
Failing to ‘get there'
Other school districts offer a glimpse at the consequences
for schools and communities that fail to “get
there” — when school boards and teachers’
unions do not reach contract agreements. A school
district in western Michigan and many in the state
of Wisconsin are still grappling with the impact of
imposed contracts there.
In western Michigan, teachers at the Kentwood School District this school year began working under an imposed contract that school officials decided on over the summer.
A state law enacted in 1994 allows school boards in Michigan to impose a contract. If contract talks reach an impasse after 30 days, the board can impose its last, best offer and hire replacements for teachers who do not accept it. The law also bans teacher strikes, instituting a fine of $5,000 a day on striking unions, and docking teachers one day’s pay for every day they strike. Teachers can also be fired for walking off the job.
Kentwood teachers responded to the forced contract by refusing to donate time to volunteer school activities – a response teachers commonly implement when forced to work under an imposed contract.
Teachers have “taken the stance that we refuse to volunteer for committees, afterschool activities, particularly things that are volunteer,” said James Sawyer, president of the Kentwood Education Association.
One consequence was the near-demise of a districtwide fifth-grade basketball league that generally drew 1,800 students a year. This school year, only 80 students are participating.
“And it will have a negative effect on the district,” Sawyer said of the lack of participation, “because a lot of our kids who go through that program are nurtured into high schools.”
When schools did open, that district of about 9,000 students saw a decrease of about 2.2 percent, or 200 students, in its enrollment, according to Sawyer.
Sawyer said that while school officials blamed the enrollment drop on the region’s declining economy, student population had increased in other school systems in the immediate surrounding area.
He also said that because state funding is based on student enrollment, the population loss meant $1.34 million less in state funding for the Kentwood schools.
Despite the threat of fines and possible firing, Kentwood Education Association members recently voted to authorize a strike.
Another region that has experience with imposed teacher contracts is Wisconsin. That state has implemented a “Qualified Economic Offer” (QEO) provision for its school districts in teacher contract negotiations. It allows a school board to impose a contract on teachers so long as the contract includes a total salary and benefit increase of 3.8 percent. Teachers have argued that with healthcare costs increasing – at rates as high as 30 percent – the 3.8 percent package increase basically amounted to a cut.
Wisconsin school boards have thus far imposed QEO contracts in 45 instances since July 2001.
“When a school board imposes a QEO on its teaching staff, it is demoralizing,” Stan Johnson, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), said on the union’s website. The WEAC represents 97,000 members, including more than 68,000 teachers, counselors and library media specialists. “Teachers are cut out of the process and demeaned. It affects morale, and leads to a very poor learning environment.”
Johnson cited a recent study indicating that one of every seven general education teachers in Wisconsin has left the profession since 2000-01, the result of what he called “salary degradation” allowed by the imposed contract law.
Contact Notebook staff writer Sheila Simmons
at 215-951-0330 x156 or sheilas@thenotebook.org.
As voters prepare to go to the polls for Election Day on November 2, the grassroots community organizing group ACORN has registered thousands of new voters and is calling on voters to choose candidates who will vote for increased funding for public schools.
“Voters need to understand the need to have politicians elected into office who are going to do things around education and that benefit our children,” said ACORN member and board president Carol Hemingway. “Or, we don’t need to vote for them.”
ACORN hosted its “Vote for Schools! Vote for Change!” rally on Saturday, October 2, at Bethlehem of Deliverance Church at W. Berks and Woodstock Streets. The Philadelphia rally, which took place in conjunction with ACORN rallies in 65 cities across the country, also kicked off a get-out-the-vote campaign that will encompass four consecutive Saturdays and involve some 50 ACORN members going door-to-door and making phone calls to encourage voter participation and support for education funding.
ACORN organizers insist that too many public schools
lack the “basic tools and resources needed for
their students to succeed.” They point specifically
to:
· Cuts in programs that fund teachers' aides,
arts, music, and physical education
· Too few textbooks for children to take home
· Unsafe or unhealthy school buildings with
leaking roofs and with mold or lead in the walls or
the water
· Classes regularly taught by substitute or
emergency-credentialed teachers.
“We used the rally as a mechanism to educate people around No Child Left Behind, and the kind of things in there that are not being funded,” Hemingway said. “People in office who are not advocating to get more funding for that law should not be elected. The important thing is to get people to vote, but also to get people to vote with education and NCLB in mind.”
While its campaign is non-partisan, ACORN called the national No Child Left Behind Act “a promise that has not been fulfilled.” It said the Act is underfunded by billions of dollars, “making it close to impossible to achieve the law’s stated goals of a qualified teacher in every classroom and children from all communities meeting the same academic achievement goals any time soon.”
ACORN charged that in the current federal budget, President George W. Bush has proposed $9.4 billion less than the amount authorized in the No Child Left Behind law.
Saturday’s rally also capped ACORN’s year-long voter registration initiative, which Philadelphia Head Organizer Ali Kronley said registered 129,000 new voters. Kronley said the effort, done jointly with Project Vote, was the largest voter registration project in the state.
ACORN leaders stressed that a focus of the group's initiative was to register high school students at special assemblies and parents at back-to-school nights.
ACORN member Marguerite Pressley’s children are no strangers to the voting scene, as she recounted bringing them along with her for numerous campaigns to pass out flyers and knock on doors, for numerous campaigns.
“I think it’s important to vote in every election,” she said, “so that they will have a voice. Say you have a problem, and you don’t vote. You don’t have a voice.”
For more information, contact ACORN at 215-765-0042.
Saying the individual efforts of law enforcement, government, school, church, and community have failed to put a dent in violent incidents affecting Philadelphia school children, one local organization hopes to spearhead a unified approach to the problem as it affects children traveling between home and school.
Last month, the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project, a multicultural, faith-based community organization, sponsored a “Public Action” where it called for an emergency summit to create a comprehensive safety plan focused on prevention and response.
Rev. Steven Avinger, a co-chair of the event, told a packed house at Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church in South Philadelphia on September 7, “For too long, we have as parents and officials been pointing fingers [at each other, as if] to say ‘you are responsible.’ Tonight, we come together to say it is our responsibility.”
Then, politicians and police officials, church leaders and community leaders, student activists and university scholars scribbled their names on a three-foot-high pledge, vowing to collaborate on a solution.
But in the three weeks that followed EPOP’s action, three more teenagers became homicide victims.
As of September 28, police statistics say, 25 Philadelphia youth aged 17 and younger were slain this year. That compares with 27 homicide victims in that same age group for the entire year of 2003.
Public safety and anti-violence experts insist that a community can stop violence, and some that have have used the collaborative approach spearheaded by EPOP.
“There isn’t a magic bullet,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s a combination of things – people working together. You get the criminal justice system working with police working with the DA working with the community. And you have community groups and schools involved.”
Falaka Fattah -- who with her husband David Fattah and their House of Umoja, were contributors to quelling gang violence that endangered many youth in the late 60s and early 70s – said, “Strategies that we employed years ago were based first on the home and family, and then we gradually spread until we had a citywide campaign.”
David Kennedy, senior researcher at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, argued that most violence hails from a small, specific group of offenders: “If you don’t reach this 5 percent, the shooting continues.”
Studies show that the impact of violence on school children is far-reaching, even if they are not direct victims of it. Research by Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center in 2000 found that “children who had been frequently exposed to violence perform less well in school, are more anxious and depressed, and have lower self-esteem than children with less exposure.”
EPOP identified several public safety areas to address: gun violence, school safety zones, and funding issues.
As of October 1 of this school year, five Philadelphia public school students have been hit by cars as they traveled to or from school, according to District records.
In one response, Pennsylvania House Speaker John Perzel and state Rep. George Kenney this month announced their sponsorship of the School Zone Safety Act, that if passed would increase fines for speeding in a school zone from $35 to $500.
Avinger said, “Do not believe that the Police Department is solely responsible for protecting our children. All of us together have a role to play in protecting our children.”
For more information, contact EPOP at 215-634-8922.
The School District has posted a "Parent Calendar."
October 1: Pupil transfer request period begins, ending Friday, Nov. 19. For more information, call the Student Placement Office at 215-299-3688.
October 7, 8: “Innovations in Education: Building a Public/Private Partnership Model for K-12 Reform,” a two-day conference, takes place at Drexel University. It promises to highlight the District’s partnership initiatives, including diverse and strategic public/private partnerships. Detailed information and registration is available online.
October 10: Extended deadline for teachers’ contract negotiations.
October 13: School Reform Commission Planning Meeting, 1 p.m., School District of Philadelphia, 2120 Winter Street, 2nd floor Auditorium. To register to speak, call 215-299-7850 by 4:30 p.m. the day before the meeting.
October 20: School Reform Commission Action Meeting, 1 p.m., School District of Philadelphia, 2120 Winter Street, 2nd floor Auditorium. To register to speak, call 215-299-7850 by 4:30 p.m. the day before the meeting.
October 27: “Peace by Piece: Protecting Our Children from Violence,” forum sponsored by Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth, takes place at Moore College of Art, 20th Street & Benjamin Franklin Parkway. RSVP and register by Oct. 20. Call 215-563-5848, or register online.
October 30: High School Fair, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 11th & Arch Streets. Open to the public (students and parents). 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, contact the School District of Philadelphia Office of School Management, at 215-299-7550.
October 30: 2nd Annual Student Anti-Violence Conference, Drexel University, Main Building, 3141 Chestnut Street. Registration: 8 a.m. Conference: 9 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. Aims to promote safety for all students, parents, teachers and visitors in the School District of Philadelphia through collective engagement and education against violence. This year’s conference is focused on students in grades 7 -10. More information is available online, or by calling call 215-299-2204.
November 2: Election Day
November 4: “A Moral-Religious Argument for Tax Reform.” University of Alabama Law School professor Susan Pace Hamil shares her account of how Alabama’s governor came to propose progressive tax reform benefiting schools and other services, 7:30 p.m., Bryn Mawr College, Thomas Great Hall. Sponsored by Good Schools Pennsylvania.
School Calendar
October 11: Columbus Day, Schools closed
October 12: Professional Development Day, Schools closed
October 18: Extended Day Program begins: Grades 3 – 8
October 19: Benchmark Test, Grades 3 – 8
October 29: Early dismissal
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