Opinion
By Rich Lamken, 10-26-23
There’s only one word for the District’s handling of the employee compensation portion of the 1 mill referendum revenue distribution and it is cluster.
The District violated several of the most basic tenets of Negotiation 101. They created a spreadsheet showing that every district employee was getting $4,800. NTA and NESPA had that spreadsheet in early August. This boxed the District into a corner. The District knew or should have known that NTA, which represented more than half of all the District employees, was going to want to give more money to its senior teachers and, therefore, less to its junior ones. Teachers’ unions always have senior employees on the negotiating team who are most interested in taking care of their most senior union members.
Instead of negotiating with and coming to a Tentative Agreement with NTA first, the District comes to an agreement with NESPA first, giving all its members $4,800.
NTA takes the money allocated by the District and starts, in their contract proposal, which the District ultimately accepted and approved, by giving its most senior teachers 10K and the next senior ones, 8K, leaving only enough money to give most of the teachers much less money than custodians, bus drivers and food and nutrition workers, some getting less than half.
6th year teacher getting 2K Millage revenue supplement, less than a 4% salary increase.
12th year teacher getting 4K Millage revenue supplement, less than a 8% salary increase.
1st year custodian getting 4.8K Millage revenue supplement, over a 15% salary increase.
The District should never have committed to $4,800 across the board with the need to bargain with most of their employees.
The voters expected that the teachers would have shared in 70-75% of the employee compensation portion of the millage revenue. This is what they thought would happen with the NTA contract.
Years 1-6 4K
Years 7-12 5K
Then 6K, 8K and 10K as in the NTA contract
The rest of the employees would split the 25-30% of the revenue and none of them would get as much as any of the teachers. Senior employees in all categories would get more than junior ones.
Many of us are livid that we’ve been deceived regarding teachers actually getting the lion’s share of the referendum revenue and are also angry that the district has completely mishandled the distribution of our tax money. What good is citizen oversight AFTER the District crashes and burns.
Rich Lamken is retired and lives with his wife, Meg in Fernandina Beach. He is a retired Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Human Resources/Technology. He was the Schools Division Lead of Common-Sense, Fernandina Beach and is the President of the Baptist Nassau Hospital Auxiliary.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
