At impasse, Rincon Valley teachers OK permission to call strike

Teachers in the Rincon Valley Union School District are prepared to strike as contract talks with district officials have stalled, leaving the two sides at impasse for the second time in as many years.

In a poll of members taken in mid-April, 209 out of 210 teachers in the district gave negotiators the authority to call a strike if talks continue to fail to net a deal, according to Mercedes Thompson, president of the Rincon Valley Unified Teachers Association and sixth grade teacher at Austin Creek Elementary School.

“The reason we are asking for a strike has nothing to do with students, it has everything to do with the fact that the district isn’t compensating us fairly,” she said. “Right now we are making 13 to 14% below state average and they are telling us they have no money for us.”

The starting salary in the district is approximately $53,500. At 23 years of service, teachers can max out at about $93,000 annually.

Teachers point to 1% and 2% percent raises in recent years juxtaposed with an influx of state and federal COVID-19 relief money as reason to consider more substantial boosts in pay.

The district’s general fund revenues for the current year are $42.5 million — 84% of which goes toward salary and benefits for all employees. The district is slated to receive approximately $7.8 million in one-time state and federal pandemic relief money which must be used between now and 2024 depending on the source.

But Superintendent Tracy Smith said those are one-time dollars. Also, the roughly 3,000-student district in Santa Rosa faces declining enrollment and a slew of unknowns as schools navigate the coronavirus pandemic, which has upended education and families’ decisions on schooling.

Smith, the lead negotiator for the district, pointed to the district’s offer of a 3% pay raise for 2021-22 on top of the 5% given for the current year, and said that there would likely be no other offer until after Gov. Gavin Newsom releases his revised state budget in mid-May.

In the meantime, the district is losing students. From May 2020 to February 2021, the district went from enrollment of 3,185 to 2,938, according to district documents. Smith said some families have moved and some have chosen independent home school programs not affiliated with the district. The reasons kids didn’t show up this school year in the middle of a pandemic is not always clear, she said.

But if they do not return, it will have financial ramifications for the district.

“If that trend continues then the state is going to start giving us less money,” Smith said. “We just have to be very careful.”

The enrollment issues are not limited to Rincon Valley. Districts across the county and state have reported similar trends, with woeful financial consequences. For Rincon Valley, that pattern is setting as threat of labor action mounts.

“I have never been in this position, where there has been a strike threat,” Smith said. “As a governing board and district administration, we are constantly processing and we would really like to avoid (a strike), and we take it seriously. It means we have some work to do, we have some repair work, we need to figure out how to develop that trust again and come up with something that will help us restore that.”

But Thompson said the district had made no substantive offer to teachers until just weeks ago ― just days after the strike poll came back with the nearly unanimous vote.

At the end of 2020, and as part of scheduled negotiations, teachers asked for a 6% raise 2021-22 as well as in the following year, plus an increase in health care coverage, the hiring off additional staff to cover yard duty and additional class preparation time, Thompson said.

There was no counter offer by talks in February, Thompson said.

“Four months into negotiations and the RVUSD counter proposal was status quo. That means that they are giving us no change in salary and benefits, yard duty or prep time, there is absolutely no change. They offered us literally nothing,” she said. “They just said they don’t feel like they can financially do it right now.”

Impasse was declared in March. When no offer was made in mid-April, the union took the strike authorization vote, Thompson said.

It was then that district officials came back with an offer of a 3% raise, plus a one time bonus of $1,500.

Smith countered teachers’ claims that the district is acting in bad faith, pointing to the current-year deal that secured a 5% raise for teachers in the current year. Locking in a multi-year deal in uncertain times does not make fiscal sense, she said.

“We are trying to build back trust through transparency and information. We feel what we are offering at this point is very close to where we stood last year,” she said. “We don’t have the next year out. We are trying to be very careful.”

But teachers are running out of patience, Thompson said, and have expressed a willingness to advance their case beyond impasse and into fact-finding rather than take the district’s current offer.

The vote to authorize a strike comes just as the district prepares to welcome thousands of students back to campus Monday for four hours of daily in-person instruction, five days a week. That move from the current hybrid model is significantly more hours than many neighboring districts are offering and dwarfs the schedule provided by partner district, Santa Rosa City Schools, which is offering two partial days of in-person instruction and three days of at-home, self-guided — or no Zoom — learning.

Talks that produced the return-to-school agreement have been held separately from contract talks. While the negotiations over how kids were brought back into the classroom, under what schedule and with what health and safety protocols, were described as smooth by both sides, the negotiations over ongoing salary and benefits have been fraught.

Both teachers and district officials point to the high-profile dissolution of a tentative agreement struck last year as the source of acrimony and mistrust. Last May school board members voted to scrap a 3-year tentative deal that would have increased teacher salaries 12% over three years. District officials said an accounting error that failed to calculate the compounding cost of the raises was the reason they nixed the deal. Officials blamed high turnover in the business office for the mistake.

But teachers accused the district of operating in bad faith.

“The district said, ’Oh we had a math error, we can no longer follow through on this,’“ Thompson said. ”Then we went to mediation because of it. We did not agree with what they were saying.“

In those talks, the two sides reached impasse, but eventually inked a one-year deal that locked in a 5% raise.

Smith credited teachers for their work in reopening school for so many students, and acknowledged the lingering wariness on the part of teachers related to contract negotiations.

“It has been a fantastic relationship and cooperative in terms of reopening schools and negotiating conditions,” Smith said.

"We need to figure out how to develop that trust again and come up with something that will help us restore that,“ she said.

Thompson said that while the return-to-school talks were distinct from contract negotiations, it was natural for teachers to think that their work would be recognized when it came time to discuss salaries.

“I think that is in the back of our their minds, ’Well maybe they’ll see how hard we are working,’ but it’s never talked about, it’s never implied, it’s never assumed,” she said. “We have to keep it separate or we will never get through anything.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.