After six years without a raise, the classified staff of the Shoreline Unified School District are pushing for a salary increase. This March, the Shoreline chapter of the California School Employees Association will present the school board with an initial contract proposal to sunshine its requests, making them available for public viewing before negotiations start up again.
The negotiations between the classified staff—school employees whose positions do not need certifications or licenses—and the district have been unsuccessful for the past two and a half years. Talks ended last February, and the three-year agreement under which classified staffers were operating expired last June. This year, they are working without a contract, which means the roughly 57 classified employees and the district are still bound to the stipulations of the expired contract.
The union’s new proposal, said Markey Lees, who represents all Marin chapters of the California School Employees Association, focuses largely on an equitable expansion of wages, including a stipend for overnight field trips and changes to the salary schedule.
“We’re looking at wages,” Ms. Lees said. “We have an interest in a fair and equitable salary increase [and] cleaning up some contract language where we’ve had trouble.” The last point covers numerous issues, including how a position should be classified and compensated as it accrues new responsibilities.
Districts annually renegotiate the terms of salaries, benefits and other conditions of employment. But last year, negotiations were stymied largely by a disagreement over Shoreline’s health benefits system.
The district has been trying to replace the classified staff’s current health insurance plans with health savings plans. The savings plan would come with an annual cap on what the district pays for health insurance premiums.
According to the district, the savings plans—which function like untaxed savings accounts—will save the district money in the long term when paired with the cap on health-care costs.
The savings plans were first put before classified staff three years ago. At the time, Shoreline’s certificated staff—such as its teachers—accepted the district’s proposal to replace their health insurance plans with savings plans.
Ms. Lees told the Light that under the district’s proposal, the amount provided for health insurance to single classified employees would drop, including a roughly $9,000 drop for families.
Currently, classified employees hired before 2013 have no caps on their health benefits; those hired after that date have higher caps than the proposed caps. Benefits for staff hired after 2013 are now capped at $9,299 for single employees, at $18,655 for those with a plus-one and at $25,163 for families.
“The employees can’t afford to take a $9,000 cut in medical benefits, and the district board was insistent on the size of the cut and had been unwilling to work with us,” Ms. Lees said. “And the staff was very clear they were not interested in trading a salary increase for that severe a health decrease.”
Last year, Linda Borello, a secretary at West Marin School and president of Shoreline’s chapter of the California School Employees Association, told the Light that the district had already lost one employee over the potential benefits cap.
Yet Bob Raines, Shoreline’s superintendent, said that the $9,000 figure wasn’t completely accurate. “The math isn’t that straightforward, because the district has also agreed to make deposits into health savings accounts so that employees are protected from out-of-pocket deductibles,” he said.
Mr. Raines said the district wants to recognize “the hard work that our classified staff do, negotiate a fair and appropriate salary increase and do what we can to establish some fiscal certainty going forward.”
He went on, “It behooves any school district to be able to have a cap on those benefits. Other things, like pension costs, are growing really quickly. It’s our goal to get as much control over those kinds of costs as we can, but then we can put the money into salaries and supplies for our students.”
Despite the administration’s past unwillingness to budge on the benefits proposal, Ms. Lees said she is feeling “cautiously optimistic” about the negotiations. Why? “Because new people sitting on the board may have a renewed interested in labor peace and bargaining with us in good faith,” she said.
Although classified staff have not yet opened the topic of health benefits in the upcoming negotiations, she believes the district will. The union remains opposed to the proposed health savings plans and benefits caps.
And, she said, “We’re interested in various other things. There’s an issue where classified staff is called in sometimes to cover for certificated staff, and we’re looking for ways to make that fair. We’re interested in finding a way to work with the district so people are fairly compensated when they step into a different role.”
Meanwhile, certificated staff and the district have completed a tentative three-year agreement that the board will consider for approval on March 11. The agreement includes a 3 percent raise each year for three years, adjustments to the hourly rate for summer school and an incremental increase of the benefits cap.