General Membership Meeting: PVFT
February 13, 2007

Convenor: Renee Heinline; Reflector: Don Brown; Recorder: Caroline Calero

I. Old Business

a. COPE: Don Brown moved that COPE’s by-laws be approved, seconded by Pat Burnett; after a short discussion, the motion was unanimously approved.

Francisco’s Report: The by-laws call for a legislative plan, and membership is encouraged to offer input on any issues or concerns for this plan. Send (by e-mail) or give your ideas to Francisco. COPE meetings will be held in the half hour prior to the General Membership Meetings, thus making the meetings more accessible.

b. Central Labor Council: Sarah passed out an orange flier discussing a rally for Health Care for All. The Rally is February 21st, at the VFW Hall in Watsonville

c. CFT Convention: The upcoming CFT Convention (March 16 – 18) will be more interesting than usual because several officers will be up for election. Delegates will be reimbursed for up to $500 of their costs (rooms are $150 each night, $75 if a room is shared). We can take up to 34 delegates. We will sit as a delegation and caucus at the site. You may self nominate or be nominated to become a delegate. The Executive Council will hold a special meeting to elect the delegates Nominations to date include: Mike Vasser, Ann May, Lisa Massey, Francisco Quintero, Carmen Gagne, Carolyn Savino, Jenn Laskin, Franciso Rodriques, Abel Mejia, Sarah Ringler, Renee Heinlein, Peter Hatch, Pat Christie, Claudia Ayers, Caroline Calero, Rebecca Cowan, Pat Cannon, Dan Spelce, Deanne Pernell, Bruce Glass, Don Brown, Linda Espejo, and Jorge Manriquez.

d. PVFT Executive Council Nominations (and Petitions): Petitions were offered by Carolyn Savino for President; Sarah Ringler for VP of Middle Schools in the South Zone; Caroline Calero for VP of Elementary Schools in the South Zone; Lisa Massey for VP of Middle Schools in the Central Zone; and Jenn Laskin for VP of Alternative Education (who fills the position as an Alternative Education Teacher, while the current officer, Don Brown, does not, and therefore he stepped down to allow for the nomination to be uncontested). Nominations from the floor were for Francisco Rodrigues and Don Brown, nominated for President; but Don subsequently withdrew his nomination. Since this is now a contested election, the process of election will include mailed ballots, and involve an elections committee. By custom, whenever a seat is filled by a person not representing the areas they are fulfilling, such Executive Council member will be up for re-election.

Four envelopes per union member are involved in a contested election. One to mail ballots to all materials to each member’s home; an outer envelope (that is signed), which contains the secret ballot in its own sealed envelope, both of which are returned to the union office in the 4th envelope.

Elections Committee: Abel has nominated himself, as did Pat Burnett; these join the following members from the Executive Council who have previously agreed to serve: Renee, Claudia, Linda, Don. A request was made to include small biographies of those running with the ballots.

II. New Business

a. Negotiations
Members are encouraged to attend up-coming school board meetings; showing solidarity. We started the year with a 3.66% raise based on previous negotiations, and unlike the district negotiators who feel the salary issue is over for this year, we feel that a salary increase is still a major priority. District negotiators say that since benefits costs have increased 9% this year, while they only expected that increase to be 5%, they feel they have “given” teachers a significant increase in remuneration. This is the last year of a three-year contract; so we are now starting to focus on the new contract, for which a priority survey will soon be offered to members. Questions from members to the representatives of the negotiating team about issues included these answers: We consider the pay scale to be of critical importance, a matter of urgency, due to how hard it is to keep effective teachers in the district when it is so easy for them to be paid substantially more by commuting 12 to 40 miles further; dental benefits are part of a packaged deal, so we do not yet have agreement on the previously discussed option of better coverage for a $20 co-pay per visit. Don sees a need to get the state law changed to make the pay scales more equitable statewide, the differences between what basic aide districts can pay and all others to an unfair advantage.

Other than salary and benefits, which are always on the annual negotiating table, everything else in the contract is now also open for consideration because we are entering negotiations for a completely new contract.

Sue Logue and Ann May have brought a proposal to the General Membership that they previously brought to the Executive Council suggesting that the negotiating team consider working on a fairness issue in their negotiations on behalf of bilingual and special education teacher who work extra time above and beyond their regular teaching responsibilities. In order to find out just how much more time the extra activities take per month, Ann and Sue have asked that we survey our sites and give them feedback. Various teachers supported the idea that the specialty teachers should be compensated in the form of a stipend, as is the case in many other local districts. Other teachers said that this could extent to other critical areas as well, like math teachers, and where will this end; shouldn’t we just try to get everyone’s salary higher. The rebuttal is that there is more money paid elsewhere for these teachers and that it is the mandated duties that are clearly above and beyond other classroom loads. And further, there additional secondary credentials are required of these specialty teachers.

b. State of Improvement School Programs: There are 7 DAG (District Alternative Governance) schools, 2 SAIT schools (SAIT—the State Academic Intervention Team is based on API, these annual scores must go up every year, even if the 3 year average goes up dramatically), and 2 DSLT (District Site Liaison Team) schools. All these schools are looking at sanctions and looking at required support by oversight committees; some of the teachers are concerned that teacher input is not being heard or acted on. From a grade school teacher: How can the DAG team have so many meetings and then not give the teachers the feeling that they are being heard or supported? For SAIT schools, the oversight committee comes in and gives non-negotiable mandates. Perhaps it is time to “work to the rule” since each effort to improve school scores results in a great deal of extra time for teachers in a wide variety of trainings and rounds of meetings.

c. General Information:
· Mary Ann Mays is back as of March 1st, she is already sitting in on Cabinet Meetings.
· The Charter Movement now includes Reed Hastings giving a million dollars to Beacon schools and Watsonville appears to be a target; we already have 5 district charters (2 k-8s, 1 k-12 charter and 1 high school charter) and they lower the amount of money remaining in the pot for the balance of the students in the district. Since it now appears that there will be an increased interest in new local charters, then we should be prepared to push back on these proposals; the greatest good for the greatest number is the test of union support.
· The 3-year Calendar Committee will start to meet again for a new round for the next 3 years of school calendar. The committee members are Carmen Gagne, Marg Jennings, Rob Smet, Tracy Palmer, and Carolyn Savino.
· Administrative surveys will initially be only for Principals; they will be available sometime soon, during the next month or so. Building Reps will give their members the ability to evaluate Principals, anonymously; the results will be returned to Principals and to their evaluators. All written comments will be typed for confidentiality at the union office as bulleted points, run together as a continuous list of comments.
· Restructure Days. There is new contract language, available on line, that protects teachers from having their restructure days misused. Whenever collaboration can be made part of staff meetings, rather than restructure days, teachers have more time to use their restructure days as they were intended. Restructure days at the elementary schools were created to allow time for individual teacher preparation.

III. Good of the Order:

a. Reflections, from Don: a good physical lay-out allowed everyone good visibility and communication; Renee nicely grew into her role as facilitator, the meeting went well.

b. State Senator Joe Smitian will host an “education update” in Santa Cruz on Feb 15th for local school board members, administrators, teachers, parents and other education advocates. It will be the first of Simitian's semi-annual updates to be held in Santa Cruz. The meeting is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. in the board of supervisors' chambers at the Santa Cruz County Government Center, 701 Ocean St. The chambers are on the fifth floor. A member of the Senate Education Committee and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on California's Master Plan for Education, Simitian will talk about K-12 education funding and legislation pending in Sacramento. He will then take questions and comments.

IV. Adjournment:

The meeting was adjourned at 6:40; weary teachers headed home for the night.