Regardless of where you stand on this issue, the simple fact is we have to stay competitive with area districts or we will continue to lose teachers to those districts! Turnover is killing our schools and the only solution is to give teachers and site administration a reason to stay with PUSD other than their kids going to the school or their friends work there too. If pay and benefits don’t compare to the towns surrounding us, who wouldn’t jump? Our town has always been known for its good schools, until recently when we are seeing drops in quality of education (personally seeing this) and drops in school grades by those independent raters. Whether you put stake in those ratings or not, it is what helps maintain or grow our property values (if you don’t have kids at PUSD) or what has a meaningful impact on our families (if you do have kids at PUSD). So support our teachers in this cause to be competitive with salary and benefits locally as that’s really what this all boils down to!

First, the title of this is misleading. There was no contract offer. Management came to the meeting with and "idea" that wasn't an offer and couldn't be shared with anyone outside the bargaining room.

Big picture: The district is going to need to make structural change at the management level. They say they don't have money to meet the demands of the union, and that's because they've misappropriated their budget to be too top heavy over the course of years. A few examples:

While the district says they've had decreased enrollment leading to decreased LCAP funding, they continue to fund unnecessary high paying positions at the district office. Look at the org charts on the district office website and see how many jobs are titled Coordinator, Assistant Director, and Coach. Many of these jobs did not exist before Haglund and did not exist when enrollment was higher than it is now, and most of them get paid much more than the highest paid teacher. Web Link

PUSD has 4 assistant superintendents who collectively make $1.6 million, not including the cost of their administrative assistants and executive secretaries, each of whom makes more than the highest teacher salary.

Haglund's base salary increased 44.4% between 2017 and 2023. In addition, he receives an automatic 3.5% increase every year, has been given full top-tier medical and dental coverage for himself and his family for life. The rest of the cabinet receives these benefits, too.

After almost going on strike 2 years ago to secure a 3.5% raise (the district's initial offer was .27% for a multi-year contract, and they wouldn't budge from that for months) that failed to keep up with inflation, coupled with the knowledge that the district received $22 million dollars last year from the state and wouldn't reopen the contract to reflect increased revenues, teachers are just done.

And ask any secondary teacher what they think of Synergy...