Agreement must first be ratified by both parties and the County
On Tuesday, March 26 at 4:45 p.m., educators dressed in red danced by the steps of City Hall. Currently unions across the Bay Area are bargaining for fair contracts. The Alameda Education Association (AEA) rallied together just outside of the Alameda School Board’s closed session. Alameda Unified School District (AUSD) educators have been paid almost 15% below the county average and their union, AEA, has been fighting for a fair contract that honors their work.
On Wednesday, March 27, Alameda Education Association’s bargaining team sat down with AUSD.
“Our team is meeting with the district to hear what they can offer in terms of pay and healthcare,” AEA Co-President and Intervention Lead at Franklin Elementary School Martha Zenk told the Alameda Post. “We are also bargaining around caseloads for psychologists and class sizes for teachers.”
At the rally, flyers were handed out detailing AEA’s three main goals: attracting and retaining great educators, preserving and expanding quality resources, and minimizing class sizes and caseloads.
Paizley Spencer is a teacher and librarian at Love Elementary and the director of pre-kindergarten through fifth grade for AEA. “We are taking action to try to get our Executive Board of Education to recognize that we need to be paid more, that we need to have better benefits, and that it’s time for them to take us seriously in our bargaining,” she told the Alameda Post. “Right now, a lot of our educators are over in their classrooms and one of the best ways to take care of overages is to hire people so that we don’t have this problem.”
Zenk says AUSD has been experiencing a retention problem.
“And it’s getting worse,” she said. “About four years ago we were paid at an average rate county-wide and now among our comparable districts we’re paid the lowest. The low pay is not just disrespectful, it’s dire, because people are having trouble finding housing and healthcare. So they’re traveling long distances, they’re looking for districts they can live in and stay. We want to make this that district.”
Before Wednesday’s bargaining session, the group of educators worked hard to ensure Measure E passed on the primary election ballot. “The Alameda voters passed Measure E with great support, about 76%,” said Zenk. “Alameda came through for the schools. Now we’re hoping that the district will prioritize keeping workers here.”
The union is also letting their presence be known with their social media presence and a collective effort to wear red.”Every week many of our school and many of our members get dressed up in red and take a picture,” said Spencer. We send it to the Board of Education. We send it to our Executive Board at our district offices to say, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re ready to do what we need to do to get your support.’”
“Red is the color of attention,” adds AEA Vice President and School Psychologist Matthew Giles. “It’s the color of power, and the color of a bleeding heart.”
On Thursday, March 28, Superintendent Pasquale Scuderi and Board President Jennifer Williams sent out a press release announcing that AUSD and AEA had reached a tentative agreement in their negotiations over salary and other working conditions for the 2023-24 school year.
Under the terms of the agreement, members of the AEA will receive an ongoing 6% increase, retroactive to July 1, 2023, and 1% retroactive to January 1, 2024, bringing the ongoing salary increase to 7%.
“In addition, AEA and AUSD agreed that AUSD would increase its contribution to health benefits to a maximum of $1,021.41 per month ($12,256.00 per year), irrespective of how many family members are on the plan, an historically significant increase to benefits,” reads the press release.
The tentative agreement also includes compensation to unit members when class size exceeds the contractual limit, a lowered class size in 4/5 combination classes, and an agreement on which unit members are eligible for seniority transfers.
“We deeply respect and depend on the work of our professional educators,” Superintendent Pasquale Scuderi said in the press release, “and we have worked hard and creatively towards a contract that reflects that respect within the constraints of state and federal funding that is consistently inadequate for the mission and mandates of public education. Today’s agreement provides a significant increase in pay and benefits for teachers, and I thank our labor partners for helping us get there.”
Later that evening, Nancy Read and Martha Zenk released a statement on behalf of the AEA. “Although we were not able to achieve everything that our educators and students deserve during these negotiations, our union board is pleased with the Tentative Agreement reached by our bargaining team. They worked formidably this year to advocate for the priorities of our members and for our students and we are all incredibly thankful. This raise, the additional major contributions from the district towards exorbitant healthcare costs, and protections for our members and special education students are all much more than what the district initially offered us. These agreements also represent the most important priorities of our membership, addressing pressing issues in our contract and laying groundwork for us to continue to do good work together for our students.
“[We] are also grateful for the honest and open conversations we had with both Superintendent Pasquale Scudieri and Board President Jenn Williams on what it takes to keep Alameda Unified a place where teachers want to stay and kids thrive both academically and emotionally.”
The School District and the Alameda Education Association have been negotiating since October 2023. The next step is for AEA members and then AUSD’s Board of Education to vote on whether to ratify the new agreement. The ratified contract must also be approved by the Alameda County Office of Education.
Kelsey Goeres is a contributing writer for the Alameda Post. Contact her via [email protected]. Her writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Kelsey-Goeres.
