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The East Bay Coalition for Student Success, which is made up of 18 California Teachers Association (CTA) chapters across the East Bay including the Tri-Valley, held a press conference last week where they announced positive collaboration efforts between district managements and local unions.
Melinda Daly, vice president of the San Ramon Valley Education Association, told the Weekly that focusing on the fact students benefit the most from teachers getting properly compensated for their work has helped garner momentum for the coalition to keep pushing for student-centered labor negotiations.
The specific labor negotiation goals that coalition members said they are advocating for during a March 29 press conference in Concord are better salary pay, fully paid family health insurance through Kaiser, eliminating the out-of-district service restriction and having districts focus on their specific needs such as class sizes.
“When labor and management are able to work together and achieve these standards, it’s the students who benefit,” Daly said. “They benefit the most, because then they have teachers who feel professionally compensated. They don’t have those extra stresses of, you know, fear of health care … some people are commuting around two hours and we can eliminate all these things so people can do what they want to do, and that’s teach.”
According to Daly, local CTA chapters formed the coalition last year in order to look at state education funding, post-Covid challenges and other issues that not only affect teachers, but in return affect student success.
The idea was to build a coalition to show strength in numbers and who would stand in solidarity as different unions underwent labor negotiations. The districts that are a part of the coalition stretch from ones such as Pleasanton, Dublin and San Ramon, all the way up to Pittsburg and Orinda.
“We want to make sure students, regardless of their ZIP code, have access to the best resources. When educators stay in the community, they help improve the emotional and mental well-being of their students,” said Celia Medina-Owens, bargaining chair for the Pittsburg Education Association, in a March 30 press release from the coalition.
Through this coalition, all of these different unions are now connected and can take advice from each other so that they can see what benefits or contract changes are being discussed at other district labor negotiations.
“We’re all working together and we’re able to say, you know, we did it here,” Daly said. “It’s possible, keep working … because it really is what is best for our students.”
One particularly important standard that the coalition is advocating for, in Daly’s eyes, was regarding better health benefits.
“To not have the stress of the ever fluctuating health care costs, it’s life changing for educators,” Daly said, “That’s why that’s a key standard for East Bay Coalition for Student Success.”
Another important goal for all districts that Daly was adamant about was the out-of-district service cap, which is a practice that many districts have in place where they put a cap on how many years of experience teachers can bring from another district.
Those years factor into how much a teacher is paid in their salary, meaning if a teacher with 10 years of experience went to a district that had that out-of-district cap, they would only come on to the job with five years of experience — which means they would get paid less.
“It’s a really archaic, old barrier that was put into place to keep people where they are and it is something that in like the year 2023, that does not work anymore,” Daly said.
“Removing the cap conveys values and teacher compensation matters. We know our shared values will be successful for students in the classroom, which we hope are also successful for other districts in the coalition,” John Swett Unified School District Superintendent Charles Miller said in the March 30 press release.
Now that the coalition has publicly announced the four standards that they say all East Bay districts should aim to achieve in their labor negotiations, Daly said it will only help those local unions in their fight to negotiate for those goals.
“We’re doing the work here in the East Bay to benefit students to give them those best educators and we feel like it’s really something that districts — labor management partnerships — will be able to say come and teach here. This is where you want to be,” Daly said.
