TUSD Board Asked To Give Administrators Large Raise, Teachers Small Increase

Tonight the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board will vote on how the Prop 123 money will be distributed. Despite the fact that the District’s finance department continues to leave all the financial information blank in the agenda descriptions, one thing is clear: teachers will be getting smaller pay raises than TUSD’s administrators and anyone else in the district who makes more than $70,000 a year.

Members of the public are encouraged to attend the meeting in support of teachers and demand real equity for educators.

Prop 123 was a compromise that allowed the state to pay less than it owed the school districts under Prop 301. Prop 123 also omits the restrictions that required 60 percent of the 301 money to be paid to teachers. The remaining 40 percent could also be used for teacher pay or a few other specific items. TUSD is choosing to use Prop 123 money to provide pay raises to its highest paid employees and to increase spending on an unknown number of budget items by an unknown amount of money.

On Tuesday Dr. Sanchez is asking the Governing Board to approve a $700 pay increase for teachers while giving all the other TUSD employees a 1 percent pay increase. For classified workers a 1 percent pay increase will be a very small raise. On the other hand, those making more than $70,000 a year stand to get larger raises than the teachers.

The Board will also review a report by the human resources department on teacher vacancies and teacher attrition for the last few years. The numbers on teacher vacancies are not accurate. According to retired educator Lillian Fox, TUSD had 120 vacant teaching positions filled by substitutes in August 2015, not just 99 teacher vacancies shown. The teacher attrition numbers are understated both for 2014-15 and for 2015-16. The numbers appear to have been changed to make it appear that TUSD has improved during Dr. Sanchez’s tenure.

Fox notes that the numbers that will be presented to the Board are inconsistent with TUSD’s numbers from Freedom of Information Act requests and from teacher job listings. TUSD teachers have been resigning at a far faster rate than TUSD is able to replace them. At the beginning of the 2015-16 school year, TUSD had far and away the highest rate of teacher vacancies of any local school district and a far higher teacher vacancy rate than any of the other 9 large Arizona school district. (The rates of teacher vacancies were adjusted for the relative sizes of the other districts compared to TUSD.)

Members of the public can attend the Board meeting at Duffy Community Center at 5145 E. Fifth Street, or watch it live streamed here. If you attend the meeting, you can speak to the Board for 3 minutes during the call to the audience. To speak, you need to fill out one of the yellow forms just inside the entrance to the Board meeting room on the west side of Duffy.

“It is absurd to think that a measly $700 raise is going to keep teachers in a school district where they are not valued, work under extremely stressful circumstances, and often work in schools where there is no climate of safety and security for themselves or their students,” said retired educator and public school advocate Rich Kronberg.

“TUSD’s leadership…both elected and appointed… is all about appearances with little in the way of data to support its claims. The numbers provided by Ms. Fox clearly show that TUSD is in a death spiral,” continued Kronberg. “Sadly, the Arizona Daily News will not cover the real stories in TUSD. The ADS will print the numbers in TUSD’s press releases, but their “feel good” stories will not change the facts on the ground. The more students who wind up being taught by a parade of substitutes instead of full-time contracted high-quality teachers the more students will be leaving TUSD for neighboring districts or charter schools. TUSD has already lost tens of thousands of students over the past decade, and as the teacher vacancy rate actually climbs…rather than falls as TUSD’s own listing of vacancies proves…more students are sure to follow. It is anyone’s guess just how many students who attended TUSD last year will remain in TUSD schools, but any report from TUSD “showing the numbers of students has gone down,” or “the rate of students leaving TUSD is going down,” must be verified by the State Department of Education before anyone with even half a brain ought to believe them.”

Kronberg concluded, “The future of TUSD is in the hands of voters. If the members of the Governing Board majority and Superintendent Sanchez are allowed to continue destroying the district it will be a disaster for the students who are not able to transfer to other districts or charter schools because their parents cannot drive them to schools out of the district or for any other reasons. Often the students least able to get out of TUSD are the ones who need full-time quality teachers and a safe, secure learning environment the most.”