As salary negotiations stall, Vallejo school district and educators enter mediation

VALLEJO – Vallejo teachers and school staff have declared an impasse over stalled salary negotiations with the school district and rallied for higher pay at a Board of Education meeting last week as the two sides enter mediation in the hope of resolving the stalemate.

The Vallejo City Unified School District has offered Vallejo Education Association (VEA) members, which include over 400 classroom teachers, nurses, counselors and other certified employees, a 4.5% raise. But union members say they need a higher raise to make their jobs more sustainable and to help stop high staff turnover.

While the district and the union currently have an active contract that expires at the end of this school year, they agreed to reopen negotiations over wages about five months ago in order to determine pay rates for the current school year. In late February, they declared an impasse and, starting Wednesday, will enter into a mediation process with a state-appointed mediator.

In an emailed statement, district spokesperson Nikki Svec stated that the 4.5% raise offer “moves us closer to an agreement,” and that the district is hopeful that the mediation sessions will help. 

According to VEA President Kevin Steele, the district has never budged from its initial 4.5% raise offer after meeting seven times to bargain, which the district did not dispute.

“Negotiations are a back and forth process,” Steele told The Vallejo Sun. “But the district won’t budge. We’re hoping for movement.”

Steele, who’s taught in the district for 18 years, says Vallejo City Unified has a long history of hiring new teachers, training them, then losing them to nearby districts that pay more. 

“It leaves classrooms with teachers with much less experience, and that does hurt students,” Steele said. “When you have experienced teachers there’s a lot more we can get accomplished.”

The Vallejo school district currently pays teachers between about $56,700 and $106,700, depending on their years of experience and degree, which is less than the two school districts it borders: Benicia and Napa Valley Unified. Benicia pays teachers between about $58,500 and $122,100. Napa Valley pays between about $68,200 and $126,100. Vallejo educators are required to work between four and five days more each year than Benicia and Napa Valley educators.

During the Vallejo school board meeting last week, about 100 VEA members showed up holding signs and chanting to demand higher pay. Some members were barred from entering the meeting as it had reached capacity. About 20 VEA members spoke to the school board, including teachers Angel Delgado and Sofia Moreno, who both said low district pay has forced them to have to work extra jobs.

“I admit to looking into other districts despite really loving my students and the community I’ve built here,” Delgado said. “I’m tired of driving Lyft after work to pay my monthly expenses.”

Moreno said she works five days a week teaching elementary school, three evenings teaching adult education, and weekends at a retail store.

The district has long faced significant fiscal challenges. It’s experienced some of the sharpest enrollment declines in the Bay Area since 2000, which have become worse since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The declines have contributed to financial challenges, as the district’s state funding is based in large part on enrollment. In recent years it’s dealt with these challenges by selling school property and eliminating job positions, but not laying off employees.

Rosa Silviera, a Vallejo City Unified teacher since 1990, said during last week’s school board meeting that she thinks too much district money is going to outside consultants and not enough is going to teachers.

“This is not about declining enrollment,” said Silviera. “This is a resource distribution problem. We need to move away from a model that attempts to solve problems by hiring consultants and outside organizations and invest in the teachers and staff that work with students.”

The school district’s most recent financial statement, released on March 6 shows Vallejo City Unified is spending about 24% of its budget on salaries for teachers and other certificated staff and about 22% for “professional/consulting services and operating expenses.”

Svec described the hiring of consultants as a way to offer support that’s needed due to employee shortages.

“The district has engaged in a number of contracts to provide essential and expected services to students,” Svec said in a statement attributed to Vallejo City Unified. “The ‘consultants’ include contracts that provide after-school staffing; supervision support; legally-mandated special education staffing where positions are hard to fill; high-dosage tutoring envisioned in the post-COVID era and largely paid with restricted COVID funding; and other direct services to students.”

Despite the enrollment decline, Steele points to increased funding in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s revised budget from last year which allocated an 8.2% cost-of-living adjustment for California public schools. Steele told the Vallejo Sun that, given what’s available in Newsom’s budget, union members feel funds could be reallocated, and a raise higher than 4.5% is possible.

Last year, the school district gave teachers an approximately 7 to 10.5% raise, with more experienced teachers getting a higher percentage salary increase.   It allocated a higher raise of 11% to administrators, and about a 9% raise to Superintendent William Spalding, which brought his salary to $300,000. Spalding plans to retire at the end of the year.

Steele said he thinks the district needs to do a better job of reallocating funds to teachers, and hopes the state-appointed mediator will help.

“We need to do what we can to keep our most experienced teachers,” Steele said. “We believe that the district has the capacity to look at the budget that they are proposing and do a better job of reallocating in order to do that.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the name of Rosa Silviera.