San Pasqual teachers protest contract stalling
About 30 participate in event Thursday
About 30 San Pasqual Valley Unified School District teachers stood in the midday heat Thursday in protest over labor negotiations that have been ongoing for two years, said the leader of the teacher’s union, Gina Hanna.
Members of the San Pasqual Valley Teachers Association protested outside the gates of the district’s offices near Winterhaven, starting in the morning after about a halfhour of talks, said one of the negotiators, teacher Kim Broby. The team was told to come back at 1:30 p.m.
“We’re in our second year of negotiations, and they’ve never settled our contract from last year,” Broby said around noon as the group protested in shifts through the lunch hour. “So we’re still trying to settle last year’s contract, and have been since June 1, which was the last time they negotiated.”
The San Pasqual Teachers Association negotiation team had substitutes in their classrooms for the morning session, Broby said, so no students were without instruction for the day.
Part of the debate between the union teachers and the district are salaries, working conditions and cost of living.
Calls and emails to the district’s office went unanswered Thursday.
Broby, who has been teaching for 27 years in the district, said he felt like teachers were left out of salary increases, especially after the district hired its current superintendent, Ruana Fox, in the summer of 2016, to replace Superintendent David Bealer, who was killed in a June car crash that summer along Interstate 8 while he was on his way to work.
“Another thing that is concerning to me,” Broby said, “is that she is the one of the higher paid superintendents in the county, and we’re like the second smallest school.”
San Pasqual is a K-12 district of about 700 students located on the Quechan Reservation in Winterhaven. Fox was formerly employed at the district before leaving to take
other administrative roles in other districts, eventually becoming the educational services director for the El Centro School District, where, according to Transparent California. org, her 2015 total pay and benefits was $157,141.58. Bealer made $149,609.32 in 2013, according to the same source. Data for San Pasqual for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015 were not available.
“The board seems to think it’s OK to pay high for the superintendent and ignore the teachers,” Brody said.
Fox was not able to be reached for comment on Thursday.
Hanna said that negotiations throughout the afternoon fell apart.
“We just left and they didn’t go anywhere,” she said about 4:30 p.m. “We scheduled another meeting for the end of October. We waited for them to come back with a counter. They came back around 3 o’clock and we countered that and that’s where we left it. We felt like they need to settle last year before we move forward.”
One of the sticking points for the teachers union is about 50 hours of unpaid training, which equates to about 7 days without pay for the workers, Hanna said.
The union and the district will meet after the next board meeting, which is Oct. 10, Hanna said.
“We’re just in a gray area,” until then, Hanna said.