Teachers Plan to Leaflet at Schools on Thursday

Novato teachers are planning to distribute leaflet at all schools in the district on Thursday to let parents know why they have come to an impasse with the school district on salary negotiations, according to Fran Rozoff, vice-president of the Novato Federation of Teachers. 

Representatives from the teachers’ union and the Novato Unified School District met last week and according to Rozoff decided that they had reached the stage where official papers would be filed with the state for impasse.

In the meantime, she said that they wanted to get the word out to parents about the stall in negotiations, which have been in progress since the union contract expired in 2009.

“We’ll be leafleting from 8 to 8:30 on Thursday to give information from our perspective as to why we’ve reached an impasse in negotiations,” Rozoff said.

Rosen said that teachers were asking for 2 percent annual increase and an extension of the salary scale for long-time educators, which currently caps at 18-years of experience, to provide bump-ups for teachers at the 20, 22 and 24-years of experience marks.

On Feb. 3, the classified employees union announced that they had reached an agreement with the district that would give administrative, maintenance and other non-teaching employees a 1 percent annual increases in salary and a one-time, 1 percent, payment this year based on full or part-time status.

The district made a similar offer to the teachers’ union, which was rejected. “The reason we said no to the 1% is that it would perpetuate the inequity we have in salaries for our teachers,” Rozoff said.

Rozoff points to a $16 million dollar reserve fund that the district is banking and says the increases the teachers are asking for would have only an additional $100,000 annual impact to the budget over the district's offer. She added that the new superintendent of schools was given 5% salary increase when she was hired last July.

“We feel that they can afford the 2% increase. We wouldn’t be asking for it if we didn’t think it wasn’t fair.

“We also feel that we lose the best and the brightest teachers in our district,” Rozoff added. “We live in a high-rent district,” said Rozoff of the cost of living. “If you can go to southern Marin and make more money, you’re going to do it.”

But she insists that Novato teachers aren’t asking for or expecting the same as southern Marin teacher’s salaries. Rozoff said that Novato teachers are looking to get the median average salaries of comparable school districts in the Bay Area with similar class size, revenue from average daily attendance and furlough days.

“We’re asking for the median average -- not the top -- that go into comparable districts in the area of instruction,” Rozoff said. 

According to Rozoff, the school districts selected to base the comparison, like the Milpitas School District, have been already agreed to by the NUSD.

The NFT has repeatedly taken the position that Novato teachers are making roughly 4.5 percent less than employees in comparable districts.

Rozoff said that Thursday’s leaflet distribution will not have an impact on the normal operations of district schools.

“When the parents arrive with their children – either by carpool or from walking – we just hand them a half-sheet leaflet,” Rozoff said. “We’ve done this in the past and it goes very smoothly.”