"Monterey Bay Teachers Union Protests Administrative Raises" by News Blog

News Blog

Monterey Bay Teachers Union Protests Administrative Raises

April 18, 2011

As budget cuts and teacher layoffs send shock waves through California's K-12 schools, a salary increase for top administrative staff is being blasted by the local teachers union.

A proposal for $56,000 in combined salary increase for the top five Monterey Peninsula Unified School District administrators—also known as the Superintendent's Cabinet—is buried at the bottom of tonight's MPUSD board meeting agenda.

"At a time when all employees are expected to take on one-third more work with one-third less state funding…we are concerned that taking this action now would be sending precisely the wrong message to the public at precisely the wrong time," said Dennis Wright, the president of the Monterey Bay Teachers Association, in a letter sent Monday to the Weekly and other local news outlets. According to Wright, MPUSD schools today have 495 teachers, down more than 30 percent from the 720 who worked for the district in 2008.

The rationale provided by Board President Diane Creasy is that as of last year, cabinet-level administrators began working 230 days instead of their previously contracted 222, in part to compensate for layoffs in the district's administrative staff.

"The current contract requires payment for these additional days at the end of each fiscal year," Creasy said in a letter to district staffers. "These additional days are now being included as normal workdays in the new contract agreement," at no extra cost to the district.

Additionally, said Creasy, the change will bring cabinet adminstrators' salary schedule in line with that of other district management staff. "To date, the Superintendent and Cabinet administrators are the only MPUSD employees that do not receive an annual step increase," Creasy said. This move, as justified by the board, would establish a uniform step increase system for everyone employed by the district.

"When I began teaching here 26 years ago, there were 24 music teachers [in MPUSD]," recalls Wright, a longtime music instructor in the district. "Now, there are five left." With such a shortage of educators, Wright has a hard time understanding how a salary increase to administrators, who make more than teachers to begin with, is justified.

The amount of the increase—rather paltry in the context of a $55 million annual budget—isn't as important to Wright and his colleagues as the message it seems to send: That administrators are worth more than teachers. "I don’t begrudge anyone getting compensation for doing work," Wright says, "but why are a select few getting an increase?" He and others will be on hand at tonight's board meeting in Del Rey Oaks to share these sentiments with the board.

The Monterey Peninsula Unified School District Board of Education meets tonight at 7:00 pm at the Instructional Materials Center, 540 Canyon del Rey in Del Rey Oaks

So five people are sharing $56,000 for six extra days of work. That is $11,200 each, $1867 a day. For six extra days! Unbelievable. While teachers salaries have been stagnate for decades. Following the national trend since Reagan, of middle and working class people getting poorer, the rich keep getting ridiculously more wealthy at the expense of the American Dream.

Even assuming that these people deserve raises, they still shouldn't be giving themselves raises. At a time when everyone in the school system should be exercising financial restraint -- and most people are -- these people are instead paying themselves more so that they can maintain some sort of status quo.

Again, if you want to think of yourself as being some kind of great leader who is charged with improving the school district, you can start by forgoing a bonus so that a few teachers can keep their jobs.

You have government thieves on one side and over one million illegal alien kids you feel we are obligated to educate. My grandparents lived in Carmel for over 40 years, so I know from your perspective, California is still a nice place to live. You are living in a bubble and you will be the last to know the true state of the state. Not until Mexican gang members show up on your pristine lawns to take what you have and slit your throats will you realize what your representative Bill Monning has inflicted on the rest of the state.

He voted against the citizens of California when he voted against a bill to use eVerify in the stateand against the bill to allow police to turn over gangbangers to ICE.