San Diego teachers plan strike over special education staffing

from Deborah BrennanCalMatters

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San Diego teachers plan to strike next month for the first time in 30 years after clashing with the school district over staffing and special education services.

More than 300 teachers rallied outside the San Diego Unified School Board meeting Tuesday in anticipation of a countywide strike at 172 campuses scheduled for Feb. 26. Teachers held signs that said “respect our students, respect our contract” and filed through the boardroom at the start of the meeting.

Union leaders said it was the last chance for the board to meet the demands, which include increased special education staffing, improved student support and teacher stipends.

San Diego Unified sets the special education caseload at 20 students per teacher, below the state standard of 28 to one. Union officials said those ratios are a source of pride for teachers, but the district is not meeting its own standards, so many teachers have more special needs students than they can handle. That’s causing an education shortage for “the most vulnerable students with disabilities,” said San Diego Education Association President Kyle Weinberg.

“Last school year, we ended the year with the majority of schools in the district with special education teacher vacancies and a surplus of special education teachers,” Weinberg said. “And this school year, we’re seeing similar numbers grow and impact schools across the county.”

San Diego Unified announced it would close schools on the day of the strike and warned parents to find other accommodations for their children. District officials said 97 percent of special education jobs are filled and said they are trying to reach an agreement with the union on other demands.

San Diego Unified is the second largest school district in California, with approx 95,000 studentssecond only to Los Angeles Unified. The last teacher strike in San Diego was in 1996, when teachers walked out of class for a week over pay and school decision-making. Teachers of San Francisco are also voting on whether to authorize a strike for the first time in nearly half a century, also prompted in part by special education issues.

“Our teachers are among the highest paid in the region, receive comprehensive benefits fully funded by the District, and work in classrooms with some of the lowest class size ratios in the region,” Superintendent Fabi Bagula said in a statement. “We have put concrete solutions on the table that remain under consideration, and we remain committed to negotiating in good faith and reaching an agreement that keeps students at the center.”

According to the district, San Diego teachers earn an average of $104,898 with median incomes totaling $20,620. That’s higher than some neighboring districts and the average salary of $100,245 and $16,919 in benefits, the county said.

The union said that while compensation is part of its collective bargaining agreement, members voted to strike over grievances about special education staff, not pay. Weinberg said San Diego teachers have been fighting for special education changes for seven years and have filed complaints against the district that have not been resolved.

Special education teachers at the rally described working conditions they say lead to teacher burnout and put students’ learning and even safety at risk.

Kimberly Carpender, a special education teacher at Bell Middle School, said some of her students are missing out on the academic support promised in their individualized education programs, the legally binding documents that describe the services. For example, she said students who are below grade level in reading can get support in that subject, but are on their own for history and science classes.

“They should get 16 hours of work a week, but they only get eight because there are no people to provide the other eight hours of service,” she said. “And it’s not one kid. It’s multiple kids. And the result is that these kids are going home with bad grades because they’re not getting help.”

San Diego Unified allows individual schools to determine how to schedule specialized academic hours and encourages them to group students by grade level and need to maximize the amount of support they receive, district spokesman James Canning said.

Mike Hernandez, also a teacher at Bell, said his classes include students with a wide range of cognitive abilities and some with aggressive behaviors. This makes it difficult to teach lessons that work for all of them, and also requires him to divert his attention when a student acts inappropriately.

“I can either be his one-on-one and take him out when he’s blowing up and flipping tables, or I can support fourteen kids for 50 minutes teaching math,” Hernandez said. “No. I can’t do both.”

Weinberg said these challenges leave teachers struggling to manage classrooms and students falling behind in learning.

“These gaps are getting bigger and often become insurmountable,” he said.

The union is demanding that the district increase special education staffing, resolve existing overcrowding complaints, schedule case management days that allow teachers to plan and evaluate students, provide $4,000 stipends to special education teachers and pay for general education teachers to obtain special education certifications. Canning said the county does not publicly release its counterproposals.

The district will offer makeup classes on March 9 to make up for lost instructional time during the strike.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.