Less than 100 school classified employees are asked to work the
day before Thanksgiving with no students in class
Morgan Hill – With no students in class on the day before Thanksgiving, some Morgan Hill Unified School District workers – bus drivers, food service workers and some secretaries – alleged they were being required to work as retaliation for protesting the district’s latest contract offer.
Assistant Superintendent Jay Totter said the edict is not a retaliation against classified workers and that those employees who work Wednesday will have “plenty of work to do.”
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) workers staged protests at several board meetings in September and October because they believe the district’s final offer in contract negotiations are not fair.
According to SEIU Chair Pamela Torrisi workers want a 5 percent salary increase because the teachers’ union and Morgan Hill Unified School District Superintendent Alan Nishino received a 5 percent salary increase.
The district offer, according to Nishino, is 8 percent over two years, with an increase in benefits as part of the package.
Union and district representatives were unable to negotiate an agreement, and the union has filed the paperwork to send the dispute to mediation, Torrisi said.
Totter said the misunderstanding about the day before Thanksgiving is nothing out of the ordinary.
“It’s pretty routine, pretty common before Thanksgiving and winter breaks, holiday periods like this, there’s always a question of who’s on and who’s off,” he said. “It’s not unusual, I’ve seen this in other districts.”
Because he is new – he started in his position at the head of the human resources department on Oct. 16 – Totter said he met with his staff and later with school principals and came up with an initial list of people that would need to work the day before Thanksgiving. He said he also checked the SEIU contract and discovered a clause that said that for the 2005-06 school year, all classified workers would have the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off.
He said the 10-month employees, those with direct student contact, were “automatically off anyway,” but the other classified workers, the 11- and 12-month employees are “obligated to work or take a personal day.”
Nishino sent an e-mail on Monday to all classified workers saying instead of their day off on Wednesday, they had to work, even though students are not in school. The exceptions are yard duty supervisors, student supervisors and instructional and special education aides.
Bus drivers and food service workers, for example, will be paid for “sitting around,” on Wednesday, unless they want to use a vacation day, according to one bus driver who did not want to be identified. She said she could clean her bus, but the time it takes to do that would not fill her whole shift.
Totter said both the bus drivers and the food service workers would have ample cleaning duties to fill the time.
Nishino’s administrative assistant, Julie Zintsmaster, has been receiving “a lot of phone calls” about whether classified workers would work or not for several weeks, Totter said.
“I thought we tried to make a decision as expeditiously as possible,” Totter said. “When I pulled (last year’s) contract, it hit me right in the face … We think we made the appropriate decision.”
Marilyn Dubil covers education and law enforcement for The Times. Reach her at (408) 779-4106 ext. 202 or at md****@*************es.com.
