Athens School Board's Response to the 2016 Threatened Strike; Disingenuous Again

The teacher's Union has finally...after over 3 years of negotiation stalemate...threatened a strike.

The School Board responded pretty much as I thought they would; they quickly put up a rope and aired their version of the dirty laundry. And just as relevant, they blamed the teachers for making the britches dirty even though it's their crap on the backside.

The Board posted, on the school website (which still pisses me off as the Union can't post information to the school website for their side of the story, but the School Board likes to post propaganda to the front page of the district site, making it harder for the public to actually piece together a coherent picture of what's going on if they are so inclined), their "Responsnse from the AASD school board.pdf." (The typo is theirs; I thought it amusing, so I pointed it out, although they may change it later).

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They start off painting the teachers as evil, untrustworthy and shifty. In their response, the Board used phrasing such as, "We would like to add that at no time has the Athens Area School Board negotiation team members met at the table, unwilling to negotiate" to insinuate that they are the victims of a vicious Union (although phrasing is kind of important, since this sentence could be read as they simply never met at the table...). They say, "We have not put unrealistic timelines or demands on the AAEA, while that has not been the case by the AAEA." That's strange, given that the opening of the paragraph states they've had 3.5 years with no meaningful movement in negotiations.

After setting up those dominoes, the Board points out with evident self-satisfaction that the Union reneged on their official statement from November 2015 that stated they would allow a deadline of four weeks after a state budget was passed for a reasonable settlement to be proposed.

The state budget was officially allowed to lapse into passing on March 27th, and here we are with a threatened strike STARTING ON APRIL 18th! THOSE LYING UNION BASTARDS! They even ended the paragraph with an unsubstantiated claim that they offered to meet for negotiations but the AAEA "simply would not meet with us." In summary, "You can clearly tell we're victims of these horribly unreasonable jackbooted thugs." You can almost picture them cringing as the teachers march into the room in full uniform regalia, drooling in anticipation of crushing the kindhearted and well-intentioned School Board under their collective bargaining heels.

And they're right! The Union did take a strike vote in less time than promised. However, the Board failed to emphasize that the ultimatum was for a reasonable proposal and show an attempt to bargain in good faith. That's really a weak ultimatum. It's like telling your kid they better not hit their sibling again or you'll maybe punish them. Reasonable proposal. Show an attempt. And how did the Board react?

Yeah, seems reasonable

The Union stated publicly at a school board meeting on April 12th, when questioned about this decision, that the negotiation team felt the Board was refusing to further negotiate after their last session as a member of the School Board’s negotiation team declared, “We have nothing more to talk about.”  At that point, the Union’s executive team made the decision to ask their members to vote on a strike. 

The next bit of the Board’s response is an outline of goals to establish how reasonable the Board is. Three are pretty clear-cut. The last one is fluff, as there's absolutely no way to measure it, but makes them sound like they care about something important. Be allowed to hire the best professional staff members? After they stated goals that equate to trying to save money and lower pay, during a three and a half year standoff? You don't want the best. You want the most naive new recruits, too inexperienced to know that you're beating them in the head with a switch from a whackin' tree while you're telling them you're doing them a favor. Pro tip: don't start off highlighting why you're being browbeaten for 3+ years by an evil Union regime while bravely fighting to reduce your teacher's benefits and pay only to end it by saying you're trying to recruit the cream of the crop to work for you.

Next, they decide to roll into the biggest issue, the nearest and dearest to the taxpayer heart—teacher salaries. Teachers are too expensive to hire! The Board repeatedly presses to not give retroactive pay (after over three years of refusing to actually settle the contract, pretending that when this one is eventually passed they won't have to immediately settle the NEXT CONTRACT because they couldn't do their job...) and lower the pay increases due when teachers increase their experience/education levels. They do this by appealing to the public's basic grasp of math, because nuance is hard.

TEACHERS MAKE $66,000 A YEAR ON AVERAGE! THE AVERAGE BRADFORD COUNTY INCOME IS $48,000! HOW FAIR IS THAT?! They even published a table of teacher salaries; they were kind enough to omit the names, but it wasn't really much of a kindness. Teacher salaries are public knowledge. While the table they provide is semi-anonymized, the data has enough information to combine with the links to the (slightly out of date) data for public teacher salary records to figure out who is who, with a bonus of now knowing their employee identification numbers used in internal business records. So, yay for more "here's how you phish for data" handed out.

Holy shit. That sweet Bill Gates paycheck must be why the teachers be rollin' in to the parking lot with diamond-encrusted Lambo's and gold-trimmed Porsches. Sounds pretty bad. Why do they get so much when I don't!? The Board doesn't link to the document from which they pulled the numbers, but mention it's from the US census.

They weren't lying, but they weren't entirely truthful. Here's a handy link to the census information at Census.Gov. It's kind of weird that the Bradford County household income is $48,000, but the US average is $53,000 and Athens Township has an average income of $51,700. But I guess the $48,000 statistic paints a more outrage-inducing picture.

But is that the whole picture? Probably not, considering that income tends to be tied to education level. Teachers are required to have ongoing education credits. Basically the government tells them they need continued schooling or some equivalent (One of the step items the Board wants to not pay them extra for having attained) in order to retain certification. Nearly 88% of Bradford County aged 25+ (and 90% of Athens Township) have high school degrees or higher. But only 17% of Bradford County (and 23% of Athens) has a bachelor's degree or higher! 

And in Athens, the major industries are...hospitals...the school...and...what? Most of your business booms are fast food, Wal-Mart and new hotels. At least, those are the visible new jobs. City-data.com says Athens' most common industry is manufacturing (27%) and the most common occupations are production- and construction- related (15% and 12%, respectively.) Knowledge workers with higher degrees seem to leave the area.

But of the educated, what are their average incomes? The Board is comparing a large population of mostly non-degreed members with teachers, who not only have at least a Bachelor's degree, but are required to continue with education in a rather specialized niche. It's not uncommon for teachers to end up with master’s degrees or higher. They're almost forced to.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the median weekly earnings of a person with a Bachelor's degree (2015) is $1,137. There's 52 weeks a year, so that comes to a little over $59,000/year. Strange...that's not too far from the teacher's salaries. Master's degrees earn about $1,341/week, or $69,732/year.

That means the teacher income average in Athens, at $66,000/year, is well within the "average" mark. A high school diploma average is $678/week or $35,256/year, for what it's worth.

I suppose the board would say that the $66,000 is still significantly higher than the average for having a Bachelor's degree. Let's take a quick glance at the data in the tables they published online to illustrate how overpaid their semi-anonymized teachers are.

Interesting how the median looks like a middle finger

Most of the staff were hired between 6 and 18 years ago! I count 27 people hired before 2000, 52 employees were hired between 2000 and 2010, and 18 from 2010 to 2015. Four of the 27 were hired in the 80's! There's a significant number of experienced staff! (Note I figured this up by hand from the chart the board provided. I may have a miscount. Feel free to double check, let me know if I missed something in the comments...)

Remember that bit the Board claimed about wanting to hire the best? Unless your job makes you bitter you usually get better at your job with additional experience.

Unfortunately that's the garlic to the Board's vampire. These are educated professionals; a significant number of them have decent experience, and have been getting continuing education. That means they're going to be closer to the upper pay limit both because they've been there a while AND they have paper saying they're smarter.

In other words, you're paying for people who are better. And the Board doesn't want to pay them. I wouldn't be surprised if part of that spike in 2013 through 2015 is comprised of inexperienced graduates...they're cheaper.

And that's what the board is focused on. Teachers are expensive. Cut them down at all costs. 

The Board’s information about the teacher work day is also misleading. Teachers are obligated to work 7.5 hours a day with a half hour duty free lunch (SLACKERS!)

The language in their response is kind of funny. "Only work a 7.5 hour day." The 40-hour workweek, when I last checked, was comprised of 5 8-hour days. Even McJobs are required by law to give you 30-minute lunches when you work over five hours in a single shift. Plus breaks. The board is complaining that the teachers aren't obligated to work the hours of an hourly fast food worker.

Well, not quite. The board goes on to complain that in addition to the 2.5 hours of lunchtime they get a week, teachers are allowed 3.75 hours per week of self-directed time. THEY WERE EVEN ALLOWED TO GO TO WALMART OR THE BANK. It's like the inmates are running the asylum. I'm pretty sure at one point the Board proposed adding instructional time by having staff wear diapers to save trips to the bathroom. (That 3.75 hours was roughly 45 minutes a day. According to most teachers, this time was usually used to correct papers and prepare for another class period. They weren't watching Netflix or leaving en masse to get more adult diapers from Walmart every day, although I can see why the Board would be horrified that teachers would run an errand while stores were open.)

To further illustrate how unreasonable teachers are, the Board said they REFUSED to work an additional 15 minutes a day without being compensated. What they still refuse to acknowledge is that teachers already work this additional time. They're just not contractually obligated to do so during the school day. The Washington Post reported that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation along with Scholastic issued a report showing that the average teacher works 10 hours and 40 minutes a day. Yes...obligated to work 37.5 hours a week, but actually on average, working 53 hours a week.

From their web page:

The 7.5 hours in the classroom are just the starting point. On average, teachers are at school an additional 90 minutes beyond the school day for mentoring, providing after-school help for students, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Teachers then spend another 95 minutes at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. The workday is even longer for teachers who advise extracurricular clubs and coach sports —11 hours and 20 minutes, on average. As one Kentucky teacher surveyed put it, “Our work is never done. We take grading home, stay late, answer phone calls constantly, and lay awake thinking about how to change things to meet student needs.”

To my knowledge, the Board has never acknowledged this. In fact, they have previously attacked teachers for being overpaid while using only the contractually obligated work time as their measure. This extra time is no secret among teachers, and it's nothing new. Just doing the basic math for hand-grading a two-page report for 30 kids in one class can take a significant chunk of time from an English teacher; if you assume 5 minutes per report (which is an unrealistic deadline to begin with), it’s 150 minutes, or 2 hours and 30 minutes. For one class. What does the Board think is going on during that "self directed" time? Teacher disco hour?

It's at a point where the Board would have to be purposely playing stupid to not know how this factors in. The requirements put on teachers, with homework correction load and prep, makes accomplishing what needs to be complete within the time allotted a joke. It's as if you were tasked with moving a giant mound of sand from point A to point B; you are going to be paid to do it in an hour. The job has to get done, or you're fired and not paid for the job. But you will only be paid for an hour of work...even though it takes two hours to accomplish. Yet, teachers still accept this as part of the burden of working as a teacher even as the Board makes it abundantly clear that they're either clueless about what it takes to teach, or they simply enjoy making the work environment miserable.

It’s laughable that the Board insists they "...understand the importance of its professional staff to remain lifelong learners" before moving on to propose eliminating some salary benefits to continuing education along with a "if you leave within 4 years of tuition reimbursement you have to pay it back" and a cap on reimbursement spending. Does the Board not understand what they're saying there? "We know this is important. So we'd like to limit it in many ways, along with adding financial uncertainty by forcing you to pay back the education you're required to get if something happens where you leave our employ AND only some teachers can continue their education at a time.” How do you negotiate with this kind of cognitive dissonance?

Then they start winding down with some mini-zings, the bits that don't all seem to make much sense as points of contention unless they are actually put into context. Eliminating the transfer clause that allows seniority to be factored into filling vacant positions? What's the problem there? Not much, except it pretty much is meant to allow administrators and the Board to place favorite hires into new positions and add pressure to get rid of the expensive experienced teachers, assisting in eliminating positions by attrition (see the number of recent hires? Just speculating...)

Most of the Board's response (or "resposnse", which still makes me giggle) is disingenuous at best. They even claim, "There have been 2 independent fact finder reports completed in the last year. Both reports were rejected by the AAEA." Those unreasonable Union bastards!

Those unreasonable Union bastards...wait, what the hell?

Um...that's kind of awkward. It pretty clearly says that the fact finder report was yet to be voted on by the Union for acceptance when the Board already rejected it. October 8 of 2015. Unanimously. It's available on the labor relations board website, by the way.

But if you were to just read the Board response, the rejection was all on the Union. Funny how a simple Google search shows that insinuation is utter crap.

The next page had a listing for an article from June 2014 when the board once again rejected a fact finder's report (and this one pointed out the teachers accepted the report.)

And for all the calls for saving money, the Board seems oddly bent on wasting money in other areas. For example, they recently spent $15,000 on a study that told them they were wasting $800,000 on transportation. There's bound to be some variability in spending...but $800,000? It's kind of an amazing article to read. And the report, too.

The Board is also cutting two checks to lawyers. This has a bill from John Audi (Sweet, Katz, & Williams) in January for nearly $6,000. (also one to a doctor, Sidney G. Ranck, Jr., for $1,200...he's in obstetrics and gynecology. That's kind of...disturbing?)

This bill has John Audi getting a check cut for nearly $3,000. And this one is another $6,500 check, along with their second lawyer, Pat Barrett, getting a check for $6,000. The list goes on.

And this is in addition to the acting superintendent's $130,000 salary (strange that seems to be missing from the salary list the Board is holding up as evidence that teachers are overpaid...)

The interesting part of that salary is that the previous superintendent was getting about $122,000/year. The acting superintendent isn't qualified to be superintendent and he's getting paid more. Part of me wonders if it's a gender thing...but that would be speculation. He's literally not qualified. The Board is paying for him to take classes and get his certification. That's why he's an acting superintendent. The previous superintendent was hired away from another district and had several years of experience. The new one is making more money and doesn't have a certificate. Somehow the Board equates this with hiring the best staff as per their resolutions back in January of 2013.

Overall the whole "response," in my opinion, is one long exercise in misleading the public. Take the claims that they have been open to bargaining this whole time in good faith with a grain of salt. They claim to care about the community and educating the kids, but their actions demonstrate, quite loudly, otherwise.

ADDENDUM

I did some quick checking of how much the frugal school board is spending on lawyer's fees. These figures were taken by eyeballing the board bills found on the school website. These reports are in PDF format, making them really really difficult to process in an automated fashion. Since I couldn't process them automatically I may have missed some payments, so the numbers I have, assuming I didn't misread some line items, would be considered a minimum paid to two law firms over the past 3 years, meaning there are probably payments missing. I think the contract talks may have extended beyond what bill items are on the website.

Regardless, this kind of money is interesting given how much the Board speaks of money problems and how expensive teachers are. It's also interesting how much vested interest the legal counsel has in prolonging the contract talks. How many meetings are there for negotiations? How much are they making per meeting?

The numbers are all there, listed with dates the checks were cut. Feel free to double check my numbers and tell me if I'm missing something. Also, I'm aware that the solicitor for the board (P.B.) does other duties, so these are not funds spent only on fighting the Union; I'm not privy to the other duties, however, so I can't break down the numbers into sub-categories. I've been told the John Audi firm was hired just to fight the Union, however, so big numbers are still big numbers.

Update 4-17-16

One of the sticking points in contract negotiations is in regards to the number of consecutive personal days a teacher may take. But it strikes me as being rather odd...what do they hope to accomplish by limiting consecutive personal days when teachers only get 3 personal days per year?

The AAEA (Union) provided an answer with a FaceBook post.

A Board member wanted to "talk" (usually situations like this implies "complain", but given a lack of specific information, that again is speculation) with a teacher. Teacher was on vacation. School board member now just happens to be pushing for limits on teacher time off.

If the implication is true the push to limit personal time off is purely for personal reasons, not for the benefit of the community taxpayers. This is a vendetta as a negotiations sticking point. How many other points of negotiation are driven by purely personal reasons?