As the Sewanhaka School Board continued to wrestle with the 2011-2012 budget, members of the Sewanhaka School Employees Association turned out in force at Tuesday night’s board meeting to express their dismay at working without a contract for their employee unit since July 1.
Addressing the board during the public portion of the meeting, employees association president Carole Katz said that half of the 125 secretarial employees who make up the unit live in the school district and many are primary wage-earners.
“Many of us are the bread-winners in our families,” she said. “Quite a few of us are holding second jobs.”
She took issue with the school district’s plan to require all secretaries in the district to use their thumbprints on readers yet to be installed to enter and leave district buildings. She said the workers find the idea of doing so “demoralizing, degrading and insulting.”
Katz told the school board the secretarial workers had turned out in force “to appeal to our sense of decency.”
Katz returned to her seat as her fellow workers rose to applaud after she finished her remarks.
After the meeting, Sewanhaka Superintendent of School Warren Meierdiercks said the board is hoping to resolve the contract in a meeting with a labor mediator reviewing the case on April 6.
“The board is looking forward to the report from the mediator,” Meierdiercks said.
Outside the meeting room, Katz said the bargaining unit for the secretaries has had several meetings with school board representatives over the past several months. She said a primary sticking point is that the school district wants the secretaries to increase their contribution to their health-care coverage.
“They want to take everything back from us,” Katz said.
Katz said the cost of New York State Health Insurance Plan premiums rose by 14 percent in January.
“It’s like a double whammy,” she said.
The average annual salary among the secretarial workers in the district is in the mid- to low-$40,000 range, according to Katz.
The board reported no changes in the proposed district budget for 2011-12 of $166.6 million, which represents a 6.6 percent increase over the current budget and would boost the tax levy by 8.7 percent to more than $131 million.
One resident made an appeal to the board to maintain the existing athletics budget, saying, “Please keep our kids off the streets.”
“Everything is under review,” Meierdiercks said, adding that the board is “trying to maintain all academic and athletic programs. It’s a very difficult budget season and there are no guarantees.”
After the meeting, Meierdiercks said the board is still waiting for a response from representatives of the 612 district teachers on the board’s request that the terms of the final year of the teachers’ current contract be revisited and revised. He said the board is expecting a response in time to finalize the details of next year’s budget by March 31. The final year of that contract would give the teachers a 2.9 salary increase.
“We’re looking for them to give us a concession,” Meierdiercks said, declining to specify the form of that concession.
At last week’s budget session, Meierdiercks said that the board had cut 15 full-time and part-time teaching positions in the current district budget for a savings of $1 million. That was part of a $2.73 million reduction of cuts that he said would not be restored, $338,303 to the athletics program that combined teams districtwide, $320,000 in evening school programs, $311,000 in the summer school program and $236,000 in building budgets.
On a separate issue, residents at Tuesday night’s meeting questioned locating all students in the English as a Second Language program in H. Frank Carey High School, which the 183 district students in the program attend.
Cami Spillane, who said she has three children attending the high school, said she didn’t think the school board had considered issues raised at a meeting with parents of children at the school.
Board member Lorraine Ferrigno said she disagreed, noting that the board had held a meeting on the issue. Board vice president David Fowler said he had personally toured the high school and found no evidence of overcrowding in the school.
Apart from the overcrowding issue, one parent complained that her daughter had been harassed by Spanish-speaking boys in the school.
“There is a culture clash,” she said.
“If there’s harassment, we’ll address it,” Meierdiercks said, adding that parents should report such incidents.
“Why do we have to take them in? There is a whole barrier. It’s got nothing to do with prejudice,” said resident Dana Deleo.
Valerie Angelillo, principal at H. Frank Carey, said that ESL students take courses at different levels of proficiency and it would be difficult for the district to coordinate their ESL classes with other courses if they attended different schools.
