After more than a year’s worth of somewhat public fighting over the nuances and meat of a contract/collective bargaining agreement, the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District and the district’s faculty association came to an agreement at the beginning of the summer. And in September, less than a month after the school year began, the faculty association sent out an email questioning the district’s interpretation of the terms of the contract.
A couple of faculty association members, including its president, Mark Goodman, also spoke up at the district’s school board meeting on Nov. 19 with regard to a certain section of the contract: the one that determines how many hours a day teachers are required to be on campus.
“It is with great frustration that the faculty association must address the manner in which the district administration has chosen to interpret the new contract and how it affects the work day,” Goodman wrote in the September email. “Aside from instructional time, the hours of 7:25 [a.m.] to 3:10 [p.m.] are not intended as a requirement or expectation of your presence at your site.”
What Goodman is essentially saying is that the teachers aren’t required to be on campus outside of the time they spend actually teaching in the classroom—which the contract outlines as five periods out of seven, with two periods of prep time.
“Preparatory work may also be, and has always been, executed off campus and before or after work hours, the extent of which shall be deemed necessary by the professional judgment of individual teachers,” the email said.
The collective bargaining agreement signed by the faculty association this summer establishes the work day as between 7:25 a.m. and 3:10 p.m. with a duty-free lunch—which means they’re not considered on-duty/active teachers—and a “regular teaching assignment” of “five (5) teaching periods and two (2) preparation periods.”
District officials contend that the terms of the “workday” portion of the contract mean teachers need to stay on campus for the duration of their workday except for lunch. And if teachers have to go off-campus for some reason during their prep periods—say to buy supplies for their next classes—they need to notify administrators.
“We think it’s important that all of our staff members are accountable for taxpayer time,” district representatives said in a statement.
The faculty association doesn’t necessarily agree with the way the district interprets the contract’s terms. Some teachers who spoke up at the recent board meeting said they were concerned hours were being docked because they left campus during their preparatory periods.
The district couldn’t confirm or deny that hours were being lost due to teachers not being on-site during the workday.
The Sun reached out to the faculty association but didn’t get a reply back before press time.
This article appears in Nov 20-27, 2014.