Negotiations between the Lucia Mar Unified School District and the Lucia Mar Unified Teacher’s Association (LMUTA)—with a mediator in tow—will culminate in a final bargaining standoff on March 25.
If a resolution isn’t reached on that day, the district’s board could vote to give teachers a 2 percent raise for the 2015-2016 school year. In response, the teacher’s union could vote to strike.
Teachers are asking for a 10 percent raise, and negotiations have been deadlocked since September.
“While we are hopeful that we can negotiate an agreement with LMUTA and avoid a strike, we are currently making emergency plans to keep our schools open, safe, and operational,” said Chuck Fiorentino, assistant superintendent of human resources at the district.
The district was allocated more than $6 million in new money this year as California restores education funding that was cut during the Great Recession. The union contends that the district has become non-competitive and is hemorrhaging teachers who leave to work in neighboring districts with significant salary increases.
“We had a colleague who was teaching AP Spanish last year at Nipomo High School,” explained union representative and Nipomo High School math teacher Donna Kandel. “She left the district because she’s making $19,000 more working at Pioneer Valley [High School], even though she had to take a cut to seniority.”
The district disagrees with the union’s assessment of the situation.
“District teachers are not leaving in large numbers to accept higher paying jobs in other districts. That rumor is simply not true,” reads a document released by the superintendent’s office.
The document puts the rate of teachers leaving over the past three years at 2.9 percent—which is only slightly higher than the attrition rate in San Luis Coastal Unified School District (SLCUSD), which is 2.6 percent.
Lucia Mar’s average teacher salary for the 2013-2014 school year was about $10,000 lower than SLCUSD’s.
San Luis Coastal is a basic aid district with the financial boon of a nuclear power plant operating within its boundaries. It rakes in roughly $10,400 per student per year. Lucia Mar, which is not a basic aid district, will receive an estimated $7,189 per student this year.
This article appears in Mar 19-26, 2015.