A parcell tax did pass and since 08 has provided $20 million a year for teacher raises.

Jim Mordecai

Apparently Tony Smith and the bargaining team for OUSD are refusing to negotiate.

OEA members, parents, and community supporters: Wear green to the meeting tomorrow, Saturday, April 17 from 1:30pm to 2:00pm at 1025 Second Avenue.

I asked Troy Christmas, labor relations director for OUSD, how many full-time OEA members had 25 years of service or more. He said his initial calculations came to about 620, as of last October. That would be about 24 percent of the membership, since the number of full-time OEA members (or FTEs) is about 2,580, according to Christmas.

That’s higher than I thought. I knew the district had lots of teachers on both ends of the experience spectrum, but wow.

Piedmont is so much smaller than Oakland that some lessons can be learned but others just don’t apply. I don’t think your last sentence about “bonus/reward being tied to Tony Smith … everyone up and down the administration” has anything to do with how Piedmont pays its administration for school construction. I think you are asserting what you think would be a good contract idea not what Piedmont does.

I also think you need to provide references to the Piedmont and OUSD construction contracts regarding work bonuses and likewise provide reference to OUSD construction contracts to have your assertion that Piedmont contracts are better than OUSD accepted as fact rather than an unsupported assertion.

Jim Mordecai

Every single month there is an accounting as to whether the project is on budget and on time. Every month everything is posted online, reported to the parents – and special notification to the school of the year being rebuilt and AT THE JOB SITE there is a notice as to whether the job is on time or ahead of schedule (even with the rain, the project was never behind schedule).

It has been said that there has never been a tax increase for schools that Piedmont didn’t love. The reason is that the propositions are well thought out, parents, teachers, administrators, and accountants are all part of the process and there is a transparency of time, effort, money, and other district resources (telephones, volunteers from outside Piedmont, etc.).

Piedmont students do not have the same issues as Oakland students – the vast majority of homes – square foot to square foot would house 20 to 25 Oakland residents – children visit doctors and dentists regularly in Piedmont, not just for emergencies, but followed by professionals who track the kids’ health. And Oakland just can’t compete with that. Where we can compete is to have ALL teachers be scaffolded up so that they know the material they teach and teach well. And we can start with the financial transparency that we see in school districts that are supported by the community. This financial transparency is about money, human capital (time, expertise, experience – not 1 year experience 18 times but 18 years experience) and build in our contracts the need for disclosure with bonus for work ahead of schedule and financial penalties for lack of disclosure and late work. This bonus/reward should be for contractors, Tony Smith, the NeXOs, the ombudsmen, everyone up and down the administration.

I don’t think teachers can get too excited about the year being four days shorter — those “non-instructional days” are mostly the days before school when we are setting up our room, preparing curriculum, meeting our new administrators; we will still need to do most of that work.

Similarly, raises for folks with 28 and 30 years in district respectively — how many of us is that really going to affect?

His class-size reduction suggestions aren’t bad, but the district won’t go for that, or enforce it if they do.

As for direct compensation, no cost-of-living-adjustment raise for ANOTHER several years, then a 2% COLA.

At the end of that time, it will have been a full decade of averaging 0.2% to 0.4% COLA even as real inflation averages 2.0% to 4.0% — roughly ten times as high!

And, as he points out, the Superintendent position received a 6.0% pay raise in a single year…