A vote of no confidence
All Stamford high schools issue complaint against Superintendent Tamu Lucero over scheduling
“The BOE and the superintendent are aware of the symbolic votes of no confidence, but right now they are focused on rallying support for the BOE’s proposed 2024-25 operating budget as it moves to the Boards of Finance and Representatives for approval.”
Kathleen Steinberg, Stamford school district spokesperson
STAMFORD — High school teachers have staged numerous protests related to a new schedule proposed for next school year, and now they've added a new form of complaint: A vote of no confidence in Superintendent Tamu Lucero.
Teachers at all three high schools — Stamford High, Westhill and the Academy of Information Technology & Engineering — allegedly held secret ballot votes in recent weeks and hand-delivered the results to the mailbox of Board of Education members at Government Center.
The results reported by teachers overwhelmingly showed no confidence in Lucero.
According to the documents delivered to the Board of Education, 96.5 percent of tenured staff at Westhill, or 140 of 145 teachers, voted against Lucero, with five abstaining from participating. Also according to the documents, 89 percent of tenured teachers at AITE voted against Lucero, while 73 percent of tenured teachers at Stamford High voted the same. Stamford High had the lowest percentage of participation of the three schools, as 28 tenured staff did not vote.
Only seven teachers across all three schools voted in favor of Lucero, according to results reported by educators.
However, none of the documents delivered to the Board of Education include names of teachers, nor which ones supported the votes of no confidence. Each school also delivered a letter describing why
teachers issued a vote of no confidence, and none of those included the names of staff.
According to multiple teachers, the reason the votes do not include signatures and were physically delivered to the board was to protect the identity of staff, many of whom have stated that they fear retribution for speaking out against the central office administration.
The most common reason listed for the antiLucero votes this time is the ongoing battle over schedules at the high schools.
For Westhill and AITE, this is the second vote of no confidence in Lucero since 2022, when they were joined by three other schools in opposition to the superintendent, in part due to a different schedule controversy.
“Lucero has continually attempted to change AITE’s schedule without consultation or support from the AITE community — teachers, parents and students,” read the letter from teachers at AITE.
Kathleen Steinberg, spokesperson for the district, issued a statement in response to the votes.
“The BOE and the superintendent are aware of the symbolic votes of no confidence, but right now they are focused on rallying support for the BOE’s
proposed 2024-25 operating budget as it moves to the Boards of Finance and Representatives for approval,” she wrote.
Lucero had originally proposed a high school schedule in late 2023 that would have increased the number of classes each teacher taught per semester, from five to six, which caused an uproar among teachers who felt it would lead to burn out and attrition, among other complaints.
The Stamford Education Association teachers union exercised its right to bargain over the impact of the new schedule and that negotiation is now headed toward mediation, likely to begin later this month.
In February, Lucero reversed course by announcing that the district would move to a sevenperiod block schedule as opposed to the eight-period version used currently at all three high schools.
Under the new model, teachers will still teach five classes, as they do currently, but they will spend 20 more minutes daily on in-class instruction.
In a letter last month to staff and teachers, Lucero said the move to a sevenperiod schedule was partly in response to her claim that the SEA encouraged some teachers to pull back extra services for students in response to the plan to increase teacher
workloads.
“Unfortunately, the SEA has attempted to impact negotiations before they even began through actions that we believe violate labor laws, including a concerted effort by some teachers, with SEA support, to withhold services from students in protest of our proposal,” Lucero wrote in the February letter. “Given these recent actions and the concerns they caused for students and parents, we do not believe formal negotiations on our proposal can move forward in good faith.”
Earlier this year, some high school teachers in Stamford began curtailing the extra services they provide students, as a way, they said, to show what would be lost with the plan to increase teacher workloads. Some told students they can no longer provide extra academic support or write letters of recommendation, for example.
Teachers — who have staged a “red-out,” by dressing in red, and a “walk-in,” where they walked into school together in an act of solidarity against the proposal — panned the sixth class idea. They have argued that the work they do outside of classroom time — including grading papers, preparing lesson plans and directly helping students with school work or other tasks, among other things — would be most affected.
“We, who vote no confidence in this superintendent, will not tolerate this continued poor leadership, attacks against our contractual rights, attempts to union-bust, refusal to be collaborative with educators or our union, or the absolute lack of high school knowledge the superintendent and her cabinet have shown and the board has supported,” read the letter from Westhill staff related to the most recent vote of no confidence.