President's Report

May 14, 2007

1. Member Issues
   1. BRT Positions: BRT positions in the district will be eliminated at the end of the school year. The BRT job description has been replaced by the new term, English Language Learner Specialist. The current BRTs will have to reapply for this or some other position at the site or the district. First reading of the New job description was approved on May 9th by the Board of Trustees
   2. GLAD Training and Summer School: Teachers working summer school who will be participating in GLAD training are afraid they will be paid a stipend rather than summer school rate if GLAD training is part of summer school. Response to concern: If they are working for summer school, they should be paid the summer school rate, even if they doing the GLAD training during the summer school hours. If they are working summer school and doing the GLAD training after the regular summer school hours, they should get a stipend in addition to the summer school pay, assuming they voluntarily want to participate in the GLAD training during the summer.
   3. Transferring Teachers. You do not have to resign from your current position if you have applied for a transfer, since you are not changing employers, only sites/job assignments.
   4. Personal Necessity for Graduation: Certificated staff may use Personal Necessity days to attend their child's graduation (page 89 of contract). Payroll will be issuing a retraction of their Memo stating otherwise.
2. Union Leadership Institute - New Leadership School
   1. Training for new presidents paid by the AFT. The training was very useful in that it included presentations from each of the Departments of the AFT. The most important aspect of this training was familiarizing new presidents with all the free services such as the Get Active, Working Families Toolkit, Membership Suite and Financial/Fiscal Assistance. I will be exploring how we can take full advantage of these services.
3. ELL Task Force
   1. I have appointed Janet Johns to the ELL task Force. Ms Johns has a wealth of experience and knowledge regarding the education of English Language Learners. Below is a brief description of her work.
      1978-1985- Bilingual classroom teacher K-6 Hall Elementary School
      1984-1985- Served on district Bilingual Task Force- Selected for committe to review exemplary programs in the state of California (1 year committment)
      1984-1987- MTTI- Multidistrict Trainer of Trainers Institute (3 years in PVUSD)
      1985-1992- Bilingual (ELD & SSS) classroom teacher, 6th, 7th & 8th grades
      1992-1995- Santa Cruz New Teacher Project Advisor
      1996-Present - Migrant Instructional Support Teacher, Abriendo Caminos
      - Maters Degree at CSUMB, May 2002
      - Doctoral Candidate – UCSC, Focused on Professional Development for Teachers of adolescent English Learners - Abriendo Caminos, Peer Coaching of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.
4. California Federation of Teachers Early Childhood, K-12 Council – See material or contact me for more information on the following items:
   1. Convention Resolutions in a nut shell
   2. California Faculty and College Excellence Act
   3. Single Payer Universal Health Care Program – SB 840
   4. NLCB – Let’s Get it Right – AFT Recommendations for NCLB
5. Challenge to Election results:
   1. The AFT has received the Election’s Committee Response to Ms Savino’s Concerns. The AFT will withhold any action until further notice from Ms. Savino. We will keep you informed of any new developments.
      

Francisco Rodriguez