SEIU President Pam Torrisi stormed out of the school district
board room Tuesday night after lambasting the board for allowing
classified employees’ hours to be cut so much that they won’t be
eligible for benefits.
SEIU President Pam Torrisi stormed out of the school district board room Tuesday night after lambasting the board for allowing classified employees’ hours to be cut so much that they won’t be eligible for benefits.
“You’re kicking somebody in the teeth when they’re already down,” Torrisi told the board.
“I know it’s a done deal and I’m hitting my head against the wall here,” Torrisi said, although the board’s vote to eliminate or reduce the hours of some 39 classified positions had not yet been taken. “But this is an astronomical amount of money that’s being taken from classified. These people are being cut hours. It’s affecting people’s benefits – they flat don’t have benefits. I think you need to understand that. You know it’s bad enough. Some of these people work for the benefits … I’m speaking for myself here, but, why would we possibly vote for a furlough when we’re cutting to 2.5 hours a day?”
Torrisi spoke of the nine instructional aides and six food service workers whose hours will be reduced, sometimes to as little as 1.5 hours a day.
The board responded by adjusting the hours of one special education instructional aide to three hours from the recommended 2.5 hours. The position right now is for five hours per day.
Trustees tied loose ends Tuesday night, making a group of decisions that brought the district’s expenses in line with its revenue without closing pools or enacting district-wide furloughs. The decisions also brought the number of teachers to be laid off down from an expected 12 to seven.
Trustees approved increasing kindergarten class size from 20 to 26. Trustees were relieved to hear that after some new number crunching based on state changes to the class size reduction program, the district could make the $160,000 savings by increasing class size to 26, not 30, making the decision more palatable.
The trustees also approved changing the titles of five district office workers. The title of four executive secretaries will be changed to “staff secretaries” with fewer duties, resulting in a lower salary that will save $40,000. This cut passed with a 4-2 vote, with Trustees Shelle Thomas and Don Moody voting against. Also, a human resources supervisor will be reclassified as a personnel technician, saving $30,000. The board approved this with a 4-2 vote, with Trustees Peter Mandel and Kathy Sullivan voting against.
The board did not take action to close the pools, which would have procured an estimated $100,000 in savings. At least 20 swim participants, from coaches to parents to the swimmers and water polo players themselves, packed the board room to contest the recommendation, which would have closed both Live Oak and Ann Sobrato high schools’ pools for six months each.
Swim enthusiasts argued that swimming and water polo are tight-knit communities that keep otherwise wavering students performing well academically. And, for some students, a swimming scholarship is their only chance at attending college on scholarship. Without access to a pool year-round, students don’t have a chance to get good enough to compete for these scholarships, students said.
“You have to practice all year, make sure you constantly improve,” Ann Sobrato High School head swimming coach Paul Harris said. “Closing the pools even two to three months, it affects these kids’ programs, it affects the kids’ futures. They can’t get coaches to come see them swim unless they’re practicing year-round.”
Some trustees said didn’t want to single out one sports program to balance the budget. Others said that if it came down to the livelihood of an employee or a pool’s heating, closing the pools would be the best of bad choices.
Trustee Peter Mandel noted that he brought up the idea of shutting off pools because other districts had done the same, and it could save jobs.
Trustee Shelle Thomas said she didn’t like singling out pools. “We could be talking about costs of mowing football fields, re-seeding them, watering them … this, that and everything else. I don’t want to phrase it around savings of a pool,” Thomas said.
Trustee Julia Hover-Smoot agreed.
“It appears that swimming has already taken a hit as it were,” Hover-Smoot said, referring to the two pools’ closure between Thanksgiving to January. “If we’re going to do anything to a sports program, we need to do it across the board.”
