By the time classes ended last June, Mary Lee Johnson had to beg, borrow and buy to get the paper and school supplies she needed at her Kindergarten classroom at North Bend Elementary.

Johnson spends up to $300 a year out of her pocket to pay for supplies, and is thankful that PTA volunteers and parents step up with drives so that she doesn’t have to spend more.

“At the end of the year, we had no paper, no supplies in our school,” Johnson said. “We personally have to ask parents to supply paper and glue sticks to finish the year. There was no paper to do the testing with. That upsets me as a teacher.”

Johnson aired her story twice last week, at a teacher’s union-led budget forum Tuesday, Aug. 16, at Si View Community Center, and two days later, at the Snoqualmie Valley School Board public hearing on its 2011-12 budget.

She was upset by the district’s projected $3.6 million general fund ending balance.

“When I see a budget with … all this money in it, I have to ask, why aren’t we supporting our kids?” she told the school board Thursday.

Contract concerns

Snoqualmie Valley Education Association, the local teacher’s union, is in negotiations for a new three-year contract with the Snoqualmie School District. State union members called the forum Tuesday as a way to back up teachers in a bargaining push.

“We are asking for a fair contract,” said Art Galloway, Snoqualmie Valley Education Association President. “We continue to have take-aways by the district.”

Galloway declined to publicly discuss the latest negotiation details, but some of the points came out during the school board’s budget hearing Thursday.

Teacher Judy West voiced her concern about a proposed $3 per hour cut for curriculum pay, part of the supplemental pay the district offers teachers for additional work with students.

“Our teachers are making $40, $50, or $75 an hour outside school, doing outside tutoring,” she said, for comparison’s sake.

Christine Kjenner also commented on the proposed cut, saying it was “disheartening, insulting, and infuriating” to see how little value the district placed on her expertise, especially in light of the new state requirements for education.

“We’ve got a lot of work coming our way. We’re willing to do it,” she said. “I have some fabulous people, they can do the job, but I can’t ask them to do it for 26 bucks an hour.”

Another issue for negotiators is the state legislature-imposed 1.9 percent salary cut. Some districts have found ways to restore that pay to teachers, and others have agreed to furlough days. School Board President Dan Popp announced Thursday after the budget hearing that the district has committed to restoring that 1.9 percent as part of the contract negotiation.

He also assured the teachers that their concerns had been heard. He echoed several other board members’ comments about bringing these complaints to the state legislature.

“I hope that everybody who’s in this room today, who has the passion for pay for teachers, takes that same passion to the legislators,” he said, “and if you haven’t, I would say shame on you.”

In response, school board candidate Peggy Johnson addressed Popp during the closing public comment period, saying “I was just a little unnerved to hear you say that all these people should be in Olympia instead of here. They come here first… Shame on you for saying shame on them for not being in Olympia. They’re here, they’re at your doorstep.”

According to the SVEA website, the association and the district differed as far back as June on whether to make union members’ paychecks whole after a state-level base salary cut of 1.9 percent.

The association was also calling for a reduction, rather than an increase, in out-of-pocket costs for medical premiums; an increase, versus a reduction, in compensation for special projects and classes; better leave provisions versus a reduction in bereavement days; improvements for class size and workloads versus suspension of overload pay for large classes.

Other SVEA issues being addressed in the bargaining include protection of students and staff when students have a history of violence; protection from discrimination and sexual harassment; compensation for school nurses working on state-required health plans for serious conditions; mentor support; and creation of a joint evaluation committee to support teachers’ growth and performance.

“We continue to hope that the district will come to a fair settlement that really does respect teachers and puts money into the classroom, so that we have the tools that we need,” said Galloway, a social studies and driving teacher at Mount Si High School.

Questioning priorities

Union members said they were told in July of district doubts about having a sufficient funding balance. At Tuesday’s forum, WEA reps said they respectfully disagree that the district has a tight budget. Union members also question the length of time that negotiations have taken.

“It gets down to spending priorities,” said WEA representative Donna Lurie.

Andréa Hardy, a researcher with the Washington Education Association, presented an analysis that says district spending on teaching is at 67 percent of the district’s overall budget, lower than the state average of 70 percent as well as that of most neighboring school districts, including Riverview.

While spending on teachers grew 16 percent in the last five years, and teacher support by 24 percent, Hardy said spending on central administration has grown the most, 41 percent. Hardy’s slide got that point across in full color, marking the administration increase in bright red.

Hardy believes that the district’s year-end fund balances—the amount of unspent revenue, about $3.6 million in 2010-2011, or 8.7 percent of total revenue—is roughly double what she considers reasonable.

Rick Krona, a former Snoqualmie Valley School District board director who attended the forum, questioned how the district could backfill teacher salaries from its reserves.

“What happens in the long run?” he asked.

To Hardy, the fund balance shows the district is solvent, but also raises questions about priorities.

“It’s about whether they believe in spending what they have in the budget on the classroom, on instructional support,” she said.

Down to the bone?

District Finance Director Ryan Stokes admits that expenditure per pupil may be low in Snoqualmie Valley School District. But he quickly adds that revenue per pupil is one of the lowest in the state, 287th out of 295 districts.

The district’s tax levy rate of $3.88 is higher than some districts, but lower than property-rich districts like Bellevue and Seattle, and the district also has a smaller proportion of students on free-and-reduced lunch, which means less government compensation.

District spokewoman Carolyn Malcolm said student achievement has risen even as the district has dealt with rolling budget cuts of $5 million over the last three years. This spring, the district received a high rating for Return of Investment from an organization called the Center of American Progress, which compared high achievement with low dollars-per-pupil spent.

Stokes and Malcolm say the district has done its best to keep cuts away from classrooms thus far, with the brunt of cuts affecting things like custodians and facilities maintenance.

The state is also cutting classified and administrative salaries. Stokes said the district has not made a decision yet on whether to backfill those categories, and is awaiting results of this summer’s negotiations.

Contesting the WEA’s analysis, Stokes sees a different picture from his own data. He says it’s all about context.

“On an activity-level basis, 80 percent of our expenditures are going to what the state would classify as instruction,” he said. Rises in administration expenditures, for example, include the hiring of Teachers on Special Assignment, or TOSAs, who led this week’s technology training sessions at Twin Falls Middle School. Teachers who took part were paid out of tech levy funds.

In the past three years, the district has increased support to teachers by providing additional compensation for training and professional development, “which includes enhanced training towards the use and implementation of technology in improving the quality and efficiency of educating our students,” Stokes stated in an e-mail.

Defending the reserve balances, Stokes says they reflect the need to plan for contingencies like flooding—the 2009 flood walloped reserves by some $2 million. He also foresees more state cuts ahead.

“We have been very careful about making sure we’re a healthy school district,” Stokes said.

What’s next?

Bargaining teams from the district and the teacher’s association met in a 17-hour negotiating session on Monday, Aug. 22. The current contract expires Aug. 31.

“We were not able to come to an agreement by 5 a.m.,” Galloway said in a phone call Tuesday morning. He’d slept only a couple of hours since the marathon negotation session, and was disappointed that there were still details to negotiate. Without a ratified contract by Tuesday afternoon’s union meeting, teachers are likely to boycott the planned Kick-Off Day on Thursday.

Galloway could not comment on the possibility of further union action.

“We’ll have some real tough decisions to make,”  he said.”

During the last SVEA contract negotiation, in 2008, both parties narrowly avoided a first-day-of-school teacher’s strike by coming to agreement a week before classes started.

“When we last bargained, we really were the bottom of the Eastside,” Galloway said. “We tried to make some progress. (But) here we are.”

On either side of the bargaining table, both Stokes and teachers commented on how the state’s shrinking allotment for teachers is ultimately at fault.

“The kids are our priority,” Johnson said. “We should be theirs.”