At the meeting on May 16 between the teacher representatives of schools and the contract bargaining team, the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) agreed to postpone the strike on good faith that the district will uphold their promise to meet and discuss how to deal with the newly structured budget crisis.
The new district budget proposal was released a week before the strike was intended to take place, and was “very different than the previous one,” according to social science teacher Lori Jablonski. “There was much less of a budget deficit, and the idea of state takeover was luckily pushed aside,” said Jablonski.
The budget crisis has been recalculated following a number of accounting errors that were found during projections of district finances that outlined how much money was coming from student enrollment and from the state. It was discovered that there were schools that were left uncounted, as well as numerous incorrect accounting assumptions. After addressing these assumptions, it was determined that the budget crisis is not as dire as the district had been saying.
Now that the budget deficit has been reduced, the threat of state takeover has been eliminated. At the same time, the district has indicated that it would be willing to meet with the union at a fiscal summit, according to Jablonski’s interpretation of the meeting.
At this summit, the district and the union would each go over their ideas on how to deal with overspending. “Hopefully we can show that in fact our ideas are doable, reliable, and could get us to a balanced budget, if that is indeed the case, all is good,” said Jablonski. “The contract that we previously negotiated, that we had previously struck over to make sure that it was adhered to, that would be upheld.”
“If it is shown through the summit that they can’t balance the budget in any way other than going back into the contract and making necessary changes then they would do that, but it wouldn’t be the district on their own saying ‘We don’t agree with it,’” Jablonski continued.
The fiscal summit will be convened by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond, and the head of the state agency that would take over the schools in the event of state takeover. The union agreed that they will cancel the strike on May 22 and place their trust in the district’s presence at the summit. “We said we will put off the strike, we didn’t say we would never strike, and we will take it this gesture that you will come to this summit and we will iron through this process,” said Jablonski.
In a letter to SCTA leaders, Superintendent Aguilar voiced dismay towards the May 22 strike, saying it would be “devastating to our students, parents, employees, and our community, as well as to our common goal of working toward receiving the necessary funding for our schools”.
He called the strike unjustified, “like the first”, and that despite his dated requests, “the District has not received from SCTA leaders a list of the unfair practices that [SCTA leaders] have identified to justify the strike”. In the letter, Superintendent Aguilar understood there were “more than thirty” alleged practices by the district that SCTA leaders believe support the strike, and “these reasons have been shared with SCTA members, and some of the District’s other labor partners, but never with the District.
Superintendent Aguilar concluded with a request asking that “SCTA provide the District with a list and detailed description of the alleged practices that you believe support the strike”. “We cannot be expected to come to a mutual understanding nor can you expect any concrete response from the District on these alleged practices without the basic information as to what unfair practices you believe have been committed”, wrote the Superintendent.