40% of Teacher Assistants Face Losing Jobs

Up to 40% of the 3,300 teaching assistants in San Diego city schools will probably find themselves out of work within the next several months because the district has violated state laws in hiring them, school administrators admit.

For years, the San Diego Unified School District has hired people for the part-time hourly positions--which pay no vacation, sick leave or health benefits--without following state education codes that require that they be full-time college students or otherwise receive special certification in order to forgo receiving normal fringe benefits.

As a result, almost all of the assistants who are not full-time college students--an estimated 2,800 of the 3,300--must now be given some sort of benefits if they are kept on the job, meaning as much as $3.20 extra, or 42%, beyond the $7.56 hourly wage now paid to teaching assistants.

Supt. Tom Payzant said Monday that there is no extra money to pay the additional costs, meaning that fewer T.A.s can be retained at a higher level of wages and benefits, even though the assistants are critical at numerous schools as classroom aides, clerks, and playground and campus security supervisors. Their presence allows teachers extra time to experiment with new ways of instruction and to boost the amount of individual attention given students.

Already, the district is preparing to pay about $540,000 in back wages and benefits to settle a suit brought two years ago by 94 bus drivers who claimed the district hired them as hourly employees under the education code even though it knew they never attended college or were not full-time students. Layoffs are now planned in the transportation department to save money to pay for the expected half-million-dollar payout, district personnel chief George Russell said last week.

To complicate matters further, the Classified Employees Assn. (C.E.A.), a labor union that covers employees who are not state-certificated teachers, now represents teaching assistants who are full-time students and is trying to negotiate fringe benefits for them as well. (Assistants who are not full-time students will now fall under existing C.E.A. contracts.)

At least some T.A.s who are full-time students will try this week to gather signatures from the 500 or so of their colleagues to decertify the union from covering them, claming that the union didn’t tell them that higher wages and benefits would lead to layoffs when representation petitions were circulated to T.A.s in the spring of 1990.

“It’s fair to say that the impact could touch just about every school although it would affect those schools which have the greatest amount” of special federal and state funds for integration, basic skills and other programs, Payzant said Monday.

Most schools pay for their T.A.s from those fixed special pots of money and do not use regular district funds. The district faces potentially large deficits for next year based on state budget woes and Payzant said he would not recommend diverting any regular funds to pay extra T.A. benefits.

The best the district can do at this point is to negotiate with the C.E.A. for arrangements to minimize the number of layoffs by phasing in increased benefits or putting off some provisions until the end of the school year in June, Russell said.

Anita Calhoun, a district principal and president of the Administrators Assn., said Monday that many T.A.s, especially at the junior- and senior-high level, are bilingual, or single parents, or ethnic minorities who cannot go to school full time and still work a sufficient number of hours at a school to support themselves or their families.

“We’re really concerned about these people because (the new situation) is going to hurt them a lot,” Calhoun said. Another principal said that she can hire four teaching assistants for the price of one teacher.

“We have a whole generation of teachers who have only taught with additional adults in the classroom and it could be very difficult for them without those second adults,” Beverly Foste, an assistant superintendent, said.

For years, principals throughout the district hired people as teaching assistants without checking to see whether they were full-time students as defined under the education code, based on district guidelines.

“The practice seemed to be working well in that it provided extra help for children, there were plenty of applicants for the positions, and the thing just didn’t really surface as an issue,” Payzant said.

In addition, the district ignored specifics of another education code section that allows T.A.s who are not full-time students to be hired as hourly employees without benefits if they work directly in a classroom, attend a college or university with a regular teacher training program, and receive a special temporary certification. Certificates have not been issued for more than a decade, Russell admitted.

“The intent was to hire college kids and use the position as a recruiting tool to get them to become teachers,” said one principal who asked not to be named. “But now we’ve got some career T.A.s who take one or two college courses and then work as T.A.s, making $18,000 or so, and perhaps have another job in the afternoon.”

But after the bus driver suit surfaced, the C.E.A. began considering whether T.A.s should be receiving benefits similar to instructional aides, who are permanent employees and do the same type of work as teaching assistants.

“We were finding that when an instructional aide retired or quit, principals would convert the money to hiring teaching assistants since that meant they wouldn’t have to pay benefits, and that was reducing the number” of our members, said Susan Hoppe, a district employee and president of the C.E.A.

“They were allowing parents or others to enroll in aerobics or basket-weaving, or whatever . . . they were just defining things too loosely.”

Last spring, the C.E.A. persuaded about 2,200 of the 3,300 T.A.s to sign organizing cards asking for the union to represent them. School district trustees accepted the union as the binding representative on Oct. 2.

Hoppe said the C.E.A.’s position is that the teaching assistants who are not full-time students must now be considered instructional aides and be eligible for benefits and back pay. Those who work less than 20 hours a week (four hours a day) would receive vacation and sick leave, while those working more hours would receive health and welfare benefits as well.

The district accepts that position but hopes to bargain on the issue of back pay and the timing of paying benefits, as well as how to determine seniority for making layoffs, Russell said.

The C.E.A.’s efforts to gain similar benefits for the T.A.s who are full-time students or fall into the special certification category will meet stronger resistance from district negotiators.

“We haven’t accepted their (first proposal) calling for full benefits,” Russell said, adding that more negotiations are scheduled for January.

In addition, Ray Ryland, a full-time Mesa College student who runs the computer lab at Mission Bay High School, is trying to gain enough signatures from T.A.s to negate union representation for the T.A.s who are full-time students.

“I think the union was misleading,” said Ryland, who has organized a meeting of T.A.s today to talk about the situation. “We all feel that we have been kept in the dark about what the (C.E.A.) is proposing . . . they asked us if we wanted more money and benefits but said nothing about losing our jobs.

“Nobody forces us to be T.A.s; I wasn’t dragged down here to run the computer lab, and I was told when I was hired (two years ago) that if I was sick, I would get no money. A lot of us feel that the C.E.A. is not in our best interests.”