Modesto City Schools board to vote Monday on teacher contract

Modesto City Schools trustees will vote Monday on a 2015-16 contract with their teachers union that, assuming members also pass the pact, will end the sides’ stormy dispute just in time to start work on next year’s bargaining.

Teachers must also vote to accept the deal.

The tentative deal would grant teachers a 4 percent retroactive raise, plus 2 percent effective in January. The district support staff union and managers group settled for a 4 percent raise for 2015-16, but have me-too clauses in case other groups get more.

Both of those contracts will reopen for a fresh look at salary because of the teachers’ deal, said Deputy Superintendent Craig Rydquist via email. Rydquist and other top-tier administrators will receive whatever raises they negotiate with the managers’ group, he added.

Without considering the other contracts, Modesto’s agreement with the Modesto Teachers Association would add $9.2 million to the district’s tab for this year.

In addition to the salary increase, the district agreed to give elementary teachers a 45-minute weekly prep period beyond the two 30-minute periods of undisturbed work time already in place, clarified MTA President Doug Burton. The contract language also allows teachers to double up classes to get up to an hour more per week without students.

The included calendar leaves spring break in place for 2016 as the week following Easter, but next year divorces it from the holiday. The secular schedule puts the break two weeks after the end of the third quarter, starting in 2017.

Teachers would again work 185 days under the agreement, with workdays ranging from four hours and 20 minutes for kindergarten teachers to five hours and 30 minutes for junior high and high school instructors. Staff meetings outside of those hours would be limited to two one-hour meetings a month, plus four districtwide meetings throughout the year.

Stipends teachers get for taking on extra duties would change, but not rise overall, the union leader said.

“We negotiated a new salary stipend schedule, but the intent on both the association’s and district’s part was to make the changes as cost-neutral as possible. The old system was confusing and did not make sense to anyone any longer,” Burton said via email.

Teachers had grown increasingly impatient with stalled negotiations, rallying before each board meeting and using public comment time to berate district administration. Word of a potential strike circulated before a marathon bargaining session with a state mediator brought the two sides together Feb. 12.

“Assuming that both the MCS board and our members ratify the agreement, which I fully hope they do, a strike will have been avoided for now, but the problems within Modesto City Schools still remain,” Burton wrote.

In other business Monday, the district will give an accounting of goals met and missed with community-driven spending. In an agenda summary of Local Control Accountability Plan progress, many comparisons await year-end numbers.

A goal not met was to hire a specialist that would work one-on-one with children in foster care. The new position requires a union sign-off held up by the negotiation impasse.

Among the goals noted as met is training in restorative justice strategies to resolve conflicts, now in place at 12 campuses, and more students taking and passing Advanced Placement tests.

High school juniors judged college-ready in 2015 grew in number with wider testing, though the percentage remained flat, with 19 percent passing in English and 7 percent in math.

Still a work in progress is the goal of expanding bandwidth on the district’s older campuses for the leap to personal laptops or tablets.

Several agenda items lay the groundwork for future construction without specifying the projects or cost.

The board will hear a report by Johnson Controls Inc. on energy-efficiency improvements that could be paid for with Proposition 39 state funding, then next will consider awarding Johnson Controls the contract to perform the work or seek other submissions.

The energy efficiencies being considered are mostly lighting upgrades to LED at all its schools. A new heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system for Sonoma Elementary is up for discussion. The changes would save an estimated $330,000 a year for the district from its $3.3 million annual electric bill.

Within the consent calendar, items not normally discussed but passed as a group, are two proposals to prequalify prime contractors and subcontractors. The go-ahead would only authorize the process to select eligible firms, not commit the district to any specific projects.

Also to be considered is putting out a bid for an estimated $2.9 million in repaving projects around the district.

This story was originally published February 28, 2016 at 2:33 PM with the headline "Modesto City Schools board to vote Monday on teacher contract."