Jose de Wit
SUN Staff Writer
A controversial restructuring plan that Española School District Superintendent David Cockerham announced in April officially died Oct. 1 when the District settled a complaint its employees union filed in response to the plan.
The two parties agreed to the settlement Sept. 30, a night before the union’s complaint was scheduled for a hearing with the state Public Employee Relations Board, and signed it Oct. 1.
In the settlement, the District capitulated to nearly all the union’s demands. The District agreed to negotiate any future changes to working conditions and restored two Transportation Department employees’ contracts to their original 260-day length, according to the settlement.
The settlement will be final after it is approved by the Española School Board, which was not involved in handling the complaint, Board President Joe Romero said.
The union filed the complaint with the state Board April 24 in response to an announcement Cockerham made two weeks before that a handful of administrators and their departments’ support staff would work fewer days — and earn less — starting July 1. In its complaint, the union argued the District wrongfully changed working conditions while both parties were engaged in collective bargaining.
Cockerham’s plan also led four administrators — Bilingual Director Marilyn McBane, Regional Quality Center Director Christiana Sisneros, Transportation Director Sennie Quintana and Title One Director Evelyn Maruska — to file grievances that wound up costing the District at least $12,473 to resolve, according to District payment vouchers.
The Española School Board, which criticized Cockerham’s plan from the day it was announced, paid law firm Scheuer, Yost and Patterson the above-mentioned amount for services that included hiring an investigator to look into the grievants’ claims and sending lawyer Tony Ortiz to at least one School Board meeting, according to payment vouchers.
The School Board ultimately dismissed the grievances, according to the grievants, but directed Cockerham to find money in the budget to restore the administrators’ working calendars to their original length. Cockerham also restored the working calendars of employees in the Title One office, but did not do the same with transportation and cafeteria department employees.
Transportation and cafeteria assistants Patricia Romero and Kathy Valdez, whose working calendar had been cut under the plan from 260 days a year to 220, did receive 260-day contracts for the 2008-09 school year, but the contracts included the one-line statement, “Pending budget review January 2009.” That sentence left Romero and Valdez vulnerable to losing their jobs if their Department faced a funding shortfall halfway through the school year. The settlement guarantees them a job for the rest of the school year.
“We got what we asked for — to be treated the same as other employees,” Quintana said. “Was that such a big deal? It’s a shame it took so much for the District to give us that.”
The District also agreed to follow a union-negotiated “reduction in force” policy to cut any jobs due to budgetary reasons. The policy requires the District to first prove the job cuts are necessary and then base the cuts on seniority.
Cockerham claimed his plan was intended to protect the affected employees — by cutting salaries, the plan staved off the possibility of job cuts, he said. He had said in April he intended to use the money to hire additional math coaches.
The union and the District are currently negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. The two sides have been working on an agreement for over a year.