2016 Wage Reopener Bargaining

SDEA Bargaining Team Reaches Tentative Agreement on a Fair and Competitive Salary Increase

Bargaining Update: September 30, 2016

After seven rounds of negotiations that first began last school year, your SDEA bargaining team has reached a tentative agreement on a fair and competitive 4% across-the-board salary increase for all of our members. If ratified by the SDEA membership, this increase would bring our highest step for most of our members to over $95,000 a year, in addition to substantially improving career earnings.

Under the terms of the tentative agreement, this pay increase would be implemented in two phases:

·         3% of the raise will be retroactive to July 1, 2016 for every SDEA member.

·         A compounded 1% increase effective January 1, 2017 for SDEA members who are on the 12 pay plan and February 1, 2017 for those on the 10 pay plan.

Although there was interest in restructuring the salary schedule, we could not reach agreement on a restructure of teachers’ salaries. Both parties realized more work and time was needed to finalize a restructure. For that reason, we focused instead on negotiating an across-the-board percentage salary increase that would improve compensation of our members, while helping the district recruit and retain the best and brightest educators. We feel strongly we achieved that goal.

In addition, we also reached agreement on a fair hourly compensation plan for supervision duties at sporting events, dances, etc. Additionally, the parties reached agreement on compacting the Early Childhood Education (ECE) salary schedules from twenty-four (24) to seventeen (17) steps improving career earnings and moving Audiologists from the Appendix A to Appendix G, Speech and Language Pathologists salary schedule.

In order to go into effect, this tentative agreement must be approved by a vote of the SDEA membership and the SDUSD Board of Education. Stay tuned for further details on the ratification vote.

• 2016 Wage Reopener Tentative Agreement
• Salary Schedule July 1 2016
• Salary Schedule January 1 2017
• 2016 Ratification Timeline
• Wage Reopener TA Flyer

SDEA Restructured Salary Schedule Proposal

Bargaining Update: September 8, 2016

At a previous negotiations session, SDUSD had proposed a restructured salary schedule that provided increases to only about half of our membership. While the general idea of a salary restructure has real merit—a restructure that does not result in raises for all SDEA members is not viable.

On August 25, 2016 the SDEA Bargaining Team made a counter-proposal that would provide a salary increase to all SDEA members. Additionally, the current SDEA proposal would restructure the percentages between salary steps, in Appendix A, to make the salary schedule more equitable while improving present and future earnings.

The proposed salary schedule would eliminate most “dead zones” in Appendix A that currently leave unit members stuck receiving the same salary for several years at a time. In addition, the proposed restructure would implement higher increases in the parts of the salary schedule where the majority of members are currently placed. The SDEA Bargaining Team has researched a restructure of our salary schedules and believes it is a smart option to pursue; however, we still maintain our right to revert to a simple across-the-board salary increase during this round of negotiations. The SDEA proposal would only restructure Appendix A: other unit members, not covered by Appendix A, would receive a 4.75% raise under the proposal.

Please note that the SDEA proposal is not a final agreed upon salary schedule. We are anticipating a counter-proposal from the District at our next negotiations session on September 15, 2016. SDEA ARs and CRs will be presented more details at the September 14, 2016 Representative Council Meeting.

Click here to read the full SDEA proposal from August 25, 2016 and for the current Appendix A Salary Schedule so you can compare with the proposed Appendix A schedule.

Bargaining Update – August 1

Bargaining Update – July 21

Bargaining Update – July 15

Bargaining Update – June 28

Bargaining Update – June 2016

 

Why Are We Bargaining over Wages Now?

In our current 2014 – 2017 union contract, settled May of 2015, SDEA and SDUSD agreed to contract re-opener language on salaries.  This language was triggered only if state budget projections came in higher than anticipated.  This was done so that SDEA could capture additional revenue increases as increases to all forms of pay for SDEA members.  Currently, SDUSD is expecting increased revenues, and therefore, SDEA has demanded to enforce this new language and engage in bargaining over how much of the money will be directed towards the SDEA bargaining unit.

The first step in this process was to survey all SDEA bargaining unit members about our priorities.  The results of that survey are below:

Bargaining Input Opportunities and Survey Results