When the Custodians Were Cut, Where Were We?

Those of you who know me outside of my blog may have heard that my daughter Lior, a sophomore at Tufts University in Boston, is the president of the Tufts Labor Coalition. The Tufts Labor Coalition (TLC) has spent most of this year working on the unionization of adjunct faculty, and the preservation of custodial positions as the University switches contractors and decides to have fewer custodians (approximately 1 in 6 custodians' jobs would be cut) to cover an expanding number of university buildings.

TLC has been working with the custodians' union, the SEIU. In the past week TLC and the SEIU held a rally and a protest where several students were (intentionally) arrested in an act of civil disobedience. This week, students are hunger striking. I'm not a big fan of hunger strikes, but there have been articles in the Boston Globe, New York Times, In These Times, television, radio programs like Democracy Now, Huffington Post, and more.

[You can follow them on twitter @tuftslabor or on Facebook at the Tufts Labor Coalition page.]

Lior is on the administrative liaison team. Here she is (bottom right)
going in to meet with the administration. Note the banner the students
have hung at the top of the stairs. Photo from @tuftslabor.

I like this picture, because it names how many families
and lives will be affected. Photo from @tuftslabor. 

All of which brings me back to what I was thinking.

Last year at this time, the Ann Arbor school district was outsourcing and eliminating custodians' jobs.

[Read: Here and here.]

Where were we?

When my older son was in second grade, he and his friend decided to have a contest to see who could drink the most water. Not surprisingly, they drank a little too much, with predictable results. The custodian cleaned up their vomit--and though we made them apologize to the custodian then, I don't really think that's the thanks, or the apology, the custodians needed.

Where were we, parents?
Where were we, teachers?
Where were we, students?
Where were we, principals & secretaries?

Where were we, citizens?

And this plagues me now, as I have heard recently that several custodians are dealing with foreclosures and evictions.

Why is it that a relatively small group of students at Tufts can make a big deal about 35 lives, and we couldn't even lift a finger?



OK...I did lift a finger. Ten, actually, but only on my keyboard.

June 2014 story

April 2010 story





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Schools: Plus Ça Change Plus C'est la Même Chose*

*The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Last week I wrote about Freedom Schools and the Freedom School curriculum, and I was looking for an Ann Arbor connection.

Didn't find a direct one (although if I had actually visited the Ann Arbor library I am sure I would have). I did find this interesting article in the aadl.org "Old News" section at oldnews.aadl.org.

I was looking for information on Freedom Summer Schools and I found that in 1971 Ann Arbor had a Black Liberation School.

"Members of the Black Liberation School staff requested permission to use the facilities of Northside school this summer without paying rent," arguing that they were serving the Northside school district.

[Was anyone who read this a part of that? Please post some information about the Black Liberation School in the comments!]

But also, there were many things that sound like the themes of the Ann Arbor school board meetings today: budget cuts, layoffs and resignations. When more people resigned than expected, Superintendent Westerman (who still lives in Ann Arbor and is on the Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel) told the school board, "We now have some freedom not anticipated to extend invitations to more of the probationary staff that were sent termination notices."

A citizen argued for transportation services to low-income students. "It is inhumane for the board to not at least give some assistance to these students." 

Last, but not least, the board recognized the retirements of custodians Clifford Bryant and Mikkel Thomsen, "for serving 'our school system with great loyalty and distinction.'"

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Screen shot of a June 17, 1971 Ann Arbor News story.
Found online at: http://oldnews.aadl.org/taxonomy/term/48518

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I would be remiss, I think, if I didn't mention that the Ann Arbor District Library has a wonderful summer game, which you can play both off-line and on-line, and can be found at: play.aadl.org.





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4 Reasons Why You Will Mostly See New Custodians in the Ann Arbor Schools Next Year

With the rapid privatization and outsourcing of custodial services in the Ann Arbor schools to GCA (assuming that goes through), you can expect that most of us will not see the same custodians in our schools in the fall.

Here are 4 reasons why.

1. Some of them will retire.

2. Some of them are very angry at the way they have been treated by the school system, particularly given the fact that they have taken pay cuts over the last few years, and they were given very very little notice that this would happen. Some of them would therefore prefer to take unemployment and look for other jobs.

I spoke to someone in that situation. She said to me, "I bought a house in Ann Arbor, I pay Ann Arbor school taxes, and now I'm treated this way?"

3. Most custodians would have their pay cut if they go to GCA Services--not to mention that they will lose their retirement benefits in any case.

4. It is not in GCA's interest to hire the majority of the custodians back. One person told me--I have not verified this yet--that if they hired more than 50% of the custodians back they would need to recognize the AFSCME union. (Even if this is not true, though, it is obviously true that if the custodians were happy with their union, the more custodians they hire from the union shop the more likely the custodians are to try and organize. GCA is recognized as fairly negative to unions, so that is not something they will want to do.)

[See, for instance:  GCA Services Enters Federal Consent Decree to Remedy Wide Ranging Accusations of Labor Law Violations]

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014, some of the labor groups held a press conference before the school board meeting. You can listen to what custodian Toni Lemons had to say here.

[I think you will have to download it. This was my first try at embedding an audio file but I am not yet wholly successful.]

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Why Play Nice, Play Fair? No Need In Right-to-Work (For Less) Michigan

Last week, a lot of bad stuff happened at the Ann Arbor school board meeting.

The two most disturbing actions?

1. The school board voted to outsource the custodians' positions to GCA Services (owned by the private equity firm Blackstone) effective July 1, 2014. Yup, that's a fortnight from now. (Trustees Lightfoot and Baskett voted against this.)

2. The school board voted that if the teachers didn't accept a salary freeze through a Memorandum of Agreement (union/board) by July 23, 2014 (that's Monday), the school board would terminate the union contract. This would have the effect of freezing the current wages and at the same time, when the contract was (presumably) renegotiated, many of the terms and conditions in the would not be allowed under the new work rules in Michigan--in particular, tenure and seniority rules. This measure was approved unanimously.

Welcome to the brave new world of school funding cuts and more cuts.
Welcome to the brave new world of a right-to-work state and union busting.
Welcome to the brave new world of taking our tax dollars and using them to fund for-profit, private firms.

State Funding

In better news: at the board meeting, Christine Stead did a nice job of explaining the vagaries of state funding (the conference committee budget basically hobbles Ann Arbor, Dexter, Saline, Ypsilanti Community Schools, and some others) and helps a few local school districts (the lowest-funded districts, like Milan, Whitmore Lake, and I believe Manchester). The state budget also sends a lot of money to for-profit charters and virtual schools, which get $175 in additional funding per pupil vs. $50 for Ann Arbor. [On Stead's blog, you can read about the AAPS presentation this week to the State Board of Education as well as some proposals for ways to improve school funding.] Their ideas--good ideas--are to have charter schools also have to pay state retirement, and to allow local school districts to ask for local tax levies for operations--currently that is not allowed under state law. And the district did join the superintendents of other districts in a press conference that day. Ann Arbor is a huge donor district (most of the taxes we raise go to support other districts) and yet we are getting the lowest increases in funding.

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Anyway--back to the custodians.

In 2010, during another round of privatization discussions (we've been through this with food service and transportation, remember) I posted this on this blog:

At the budget meeting that I went to, several people at my table raised concerns about privatization. They wondered what the actual (not projected) savings were when the food service was privatized (the facilitator didn't know). They talked about how satisfaction (on the part of people who eat the lunches) had gone down. And they wondered about the effects on the "lunch ladies."
"Well," our facilitator said, "I believe that the new company hired everyone who wanted to be hired, for the same wages, and the only thing they lost was retirement benefits."

It's more than a little bit troubling to hear someone who makes more than $100,000/year (the facilitator referred to above is an AAPS administrator) talk about someone who is living on $25,000/year and say "they only lost retirement benefits." I'm pretty sure if I talked about yanking her retirement, she would be pretty upset, and she's not living near the poverty level.

Retirement costs, in fact, are the main reason for privatizing (since the custodians already gave major concessions a couple of years ago). Basically, if somebody is an AAPS employee, AAPS has to pay their retirement costs (state law)--and if they are not, they don't.

I found Jeanice Swift's letter to Ann Arbor parents about the custodian privatization to be disingenuous. [Read it here--with my comments.] I'm still not clear why she felt she needed to respond to the emails she and the board were getting about custodians losing their jobs and face pay cuts with "everyone gets an interview" and "pay cuts will not be as significant as perceived." An interview is not a job, and if you only make $25,000 a year and you get a 10% pay cut plus lose your retirement? I think that's pretty significant. Saying, "all the other districts are doing it too?" My parents didn't take that as a good reason to do or not do something. Speaking for myself, I'd prefer the honesty of  a letter that said simply, "this sucks and it's because of the state legislature's decisions, and we are trying to keep the cuts away from the classroom."

The other very disturbing piece of this has to do with the timing. The outsourcing was approved by the board as a special briefing. Any time you see the words "special briefing" you know that means that they are not following their own approved process. They are rushing things through. While I feel O.K. about that for ordering the Huron High School band uniforms, which would be done anyway and for which the money was already set aside (another item on the agenda), I'm not O.K. with that for decisions like outsourcing custodians. [I've written about this before in the Ann Arbor Chronicle. I'm starting to see a pattern here.]

The custodians had come to the school board with a proposal for a worker-owned co-op, and the board--with straight faces--tried to tell them that if they had only proposed that a little earlier...oh gee they really wished they could do it but their counsel told them that since the RFP had closed they couldn't...

Since it's a special briefing item, though, you know the board was working on a ridiculously short timeline. The union was told about the RFP and the agenda item less than a week before the RFP made it on the agenda.  The RFP was posted for only a week. How long do you think the top 3 companies knew that the RFP was coming? A different timeline could have led to a different result.

[By the way, teacher Chloe Root has started a petition out asking the board to reconsider. Sign it here.]

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How about those teachers? 

We might describe the resolution passed by the school board as a Faustian bargain--on the part of the district.

Last year, with Superintendent Pat Green, the AAEA (teachers' union) agreed to a salary freeze, advertised as "one year only." At the time, I wondered about that--figuring that the state's school aid fund probably wasn't going to look better next year, so why make a one-year only plan? But Pat Green was on her way out, and I believe she only cared about getting the budget out the door, whatever it looked like. I don't know what the teachers' union was thinking.

In any case, Jeanice Swift walked into a situation where now she had to ask the teachers to again take a salary freeze, and my guess is that the teachers' union was not too happy about that. There is, really, an alternative to a salary freeze though--and it's having larger class sizes. Parents wouldn't be too happy about that, we already know it is one reason people have left the school district, but it exists.

Apparently, the teachers' union has not been all that willing to concede the salary freeze again. And yes, it's true that the teachers have had many types of cutbacks for many years. So after going into executive session, the school board came out and voted--unanimously--to terminate the teacher contract unless the teachers agree to having a total wage freeze, as agreed to by a Memorandum of Agreement by this Monday, June 23d. Under termination, teachers still get the a wage freeze, but lose some of the items in the contract.

And here's where Faust comes in--maybe. Several things have changed in state law in the past couple of years, including right-to-work and some changes in the teacher tenure law. There are items in the contract that cannot be retained if the teachers' union loses this contract and starts a new contract--primarily around tenure, seniority, and right to work/union dues.

So the school board--and the Superintendent--are essentially bullying the teachers and forcing the teachers to say "uncle." But that's at the risk of having much worse relations with the teachers in the future. Could this have been avoided?

Maybe it's not such a risk. I have a perception that the teachers' union is dispirited and disorganized. Expect the number of retirements to rise...

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Let's Privatize the Teachers

Now if you are wondering: why don't they just privatize the teachers? Could they privatize the teachers? That's what the charter schools do. Retirement costs are the main driver of the reason to privatize, right? The districts  have already outsourced the substitute teachers, the food service workers, the school bus drivers... Everybody knows the "first they came for the Socialists" passage by Pastor Martin Niemoller, right?

They would, probably, if they could--and maybe soon they will be able to.

But for now, they can't. I had to ask Steve Norton of Michigan Parents for Schools about this--and it turns out that he had been wondering too, and had looked it up (thank you Steve for being an education policy wonk!!). This is an excerpt from his email, and my takeaway is that "the devil is in the details."

Under current law, school districts must hire teachers directly - i.e., teachers must be direct employees of the school district. The language is a consequence of this part of the revised school code:
380.1231 Hiring of teachers; teachers' contracts generally.Sec. 1231.
(1) The board of a school district shall hire and contract with qualified teachers....
Unlike other sections that cover background checks, etc, this section does not mention or include public school academies (charters). In the sections that create charters, they are given explicit permission to hire outside individuals or firms to provide comprehensive services to and operate the charter. Thus, outside management companies may be hired by charters to run the schools, including hiring teachers. 

In an attorney general opinion from 1997 (? I think), the AG determined that direct employees of any school board, including the boards of charter schools, MUST participate in MPSERS. However, contract employees MAY NOT participate in MPSERS. 

Since charters are allowed to contract out instructional services, they can avoid paying into MPSERS on those employees. Local school districts are not allowed to do that, and so they must therefore pay into MPSERS for teachers and all direct employees. 

This is the reason that even "self-managed" charters like Ann Arbor Learning Community technically "lease" their employees from a private firm, which allows them to classify teachers as contract employees and thus avoid paying into MPSERS on their behalf. Very, very, few charters participate in MPSERS. 

By the way, the original version of the charter uncapping bill, SB 618 of 2011, included a new section (section 1231A), which would have allowed local school districts to contract out for teachers. That provision was not removed until the bill got to the Senate floor, as part of a compromise to get it passed. (Emphasis added.)

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Dreaming

I dream a world, where those same cuts need to happen, but the district shares the possibility with the custodians that this might happen three months in advance. Then the custodians have time to organize the employee-owned co-op. They lose their retirement, but they get to maintain their dignity. We get to keep our money from going to fund yet another for-profit business. That requires the timing to be different, and I believe it could have been different.

I dream a world, where the district asks the teachers' union to find those same cuts as a salary freeze or in some other way, and gives the union time to figure that out.

I dream a world where the district's timelines for working with employees are more reasonable, and where the district doesn't try to hide things from the public, or push important items through on special briefings...

Wait--that's not my REAL dream.

In my REAL dreams, all schools are adequately funded, Michigan is not a right-to-work-for-less state, AND the school board uses reasonable timelines.

That first set of dreams? They could be a reality, if the school board and the superintendent would decide to treat their employees with respect, and not as commodities.

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Lingering Question

Was this a conscious choice on Jeanice Swift's part, to shorten timelines in order to keep the public and the employees out of the process? Or did everything take longer than she thought it would and with a new finance person and her first budget, everything got done at the last possible minute?



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AAPS Budget, Public Hearing, Rick DeKeon Wednesday May 28, 2014

Wednesday, May 28th, the Ann Arbor school board will have a public hearing on the proposed AAPS budget. The meeting starts at 7 p.m.

Here are some options:
1. Go and talk during public commentary
2. Watch the board meeting on t.v. (CTN Comcast Channel 18, and also available for online streaming, but not for on-demand replay--yet. The replay schedule is: Thursday @ 1:30pm, Saturday @ 8am, Sunday @ 1pm)
3. Email the school board with your thoughts at boe@aaps.k12.mi.us.

The board will vote on the budget at their next meeting, in two weeks.

Essential Reading

Here is the proposed AAPS 2014-2015 budget.

Here are the proposed expenditures and revenue enhancements. (Looks like a summary sheet, essentially.)

Here is the proposed budget plan. (How the budget gap will be closed.)

Compare the governor's, senate's, and house's education proposals and their impact on the AAPS budget. (There are also some slides from the new finance director--Marios Demetriou,
Assistant Superintendent, Finance and Operations--that, to be honest, I did not completely understand. Explanatory text would be nice.)

Major Proposals

How do you feel about the proposal to freeze all staff salaries, with no step or salary increases for any group? (Teachers, for example, took a 3% pay cut last year that was supposed to be a one-year pay cut. This would not be restored.)

How do you feel about the outsourcing of custodial work? (The main expected savings here has to do with the fact that the district has to pay into the state retirement fund for employees--if the positions are privatized, the state retirement fund doesn't have to be paid.)

Here are some things I've written about privatization in the past:

Transportation Lessons, 2010-2012 (February 2012)

Just Say No to Privatization (January 2010)

What do you think about Christine Stead's suggestion that the district should investigate whether there would be any possibility of suing the state for the constant cuts the district has had to make, since we are not being "held harmless?" (I LOVE IT.)

Let the school board know how you feel!

Special Bonus! 

Rick DeKeon
from a2schools.org

If you go to tomorrow's meeting. . . there is also a proposal to rename the Northside School Gym in honor of Rick DeKeon, well-loved Northside physical education teacher.

As the proposal says,

On behalf of Northside Principal, Monica Harrold, Northside staff, students, parents and alumni, it is my pleasure to present to you a recommendation, pursuant to Ann Arbor Public School Board of Education Policy 7150- Naming, to name the Northside Elementary School gym after former Ann Arbor Northside Elementary School physical education teacher and local coach Richard (Rick) Dekeon. 
Mr. Dekeon, a much beloved teacher at Northside for 25 years, passed away on November 8, 2013 leaving behind an incredible legacy that extends well beyond the Northside community.

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Ypsilanti Community School Employee Benefits are Highly Skewed

About three weeks ago, I wrote about reports that I had heard, that while Ypsilanti Community Schools teachers and administrators would be offered both individual and family insurance, support staff would not be offered family insurance.

At the time, I wrote this:

3. At a recent combined board meeting, the head of the (I heard this second-hand, but I think it was the) Ypsilanti custodians' union got up to speak to the board about the fact that they had been told that while teachers and administrators would get benefits for themselves and their families, the custodians, paraprofessionals, office staff, and more would only be able to get individual health benefits. 
According to a May 13, 2013 report in the Ypsilanti Courier, 

Menzel said the most significant difference [in terms of employment] is that some employees won't be eligible for spousal or family coverage. While teachers, administrators, and several other groups of staff members will receive options for single, spousal, or family coverage, other groups, such as paraprofessionals and custodial staff, will only be offered single person coverage.

And at the time, I mentioned that I couldn't really find anything written saying that support staff would not get benefits. I guess the district decided that went too far (or would have left them subject to a lawsuit?). So now, the costs for health care for individuals and their families have been posted. As you can see, there is a huge inequity between what teachers and administrators will pay for family health care, and what support staff will pay.

Support staff will pay up to 4x as much as teachers and administrators for family benefits, even though the support staff group, as a whole, will make much less money. 

Sunday night I emailed Scott Menzel (WISD Superintendent) and Emma Jackson (WISD Director of Communications) asking for their comments on the rationale for this decision. I haven't heard back yet. If I do, I'll be sure to post their answer(s) here. 

[Hint: You could email them yourself and ask about this--or whatever else you want to know about YCS. Emails: smenzel@wash.k12.mi.us; ejackson@wash.k12.mi.us].

Reminder: YCS Board Meeting Packets and Minutes (such as they are--they are not very detailed) can be found here. It appears that almost nobody has been making public comments to the board, but the time is available for those who want to speak.