Fake crisis in Long Beach

LONG BEACH, Calif.--In spite of its sky-is-falling rhetoric at last year's negotiations with its union workforce, the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) actually added $31 million dollars to its unrestricted reserve, bringing the total up to 13.94 percent of its budget (California law requires a minimum of 3 percent).

That means that last year's five furlough days and layoffs of 500 teachers by LBUSD weren't motivated by an urgent crisis. Rather, they resulted in LBUSD socking away more money in the district's bank accounts.

As sickening as it is to our union members to know that our colleagues--our friends--lost their jobs so that the district could sit on a larger pile of cash, LBUSD officials are not yet finished. The cuts they are demanding now are "open-ended," meaning they will grow each year even without further negotiations.

LBUSD wants to cap contributions to employee health care, and they want to cap it at 5 percent less than they paid this year (so workers get hit with charges of $400 to $1,000 right away). Then, every increase in health care costs from here to eternity would come out of the pockets of the workers, amounting to hundreds of dollars more every year.

To this, they are adding the continuing threat of layoffs and furlough days, while predicting utter ruin if we refuse. Although they cry poverty at the bargaining table, it is interesting to note that they have not claimed a fiscal emergency to the county of Los Angeles. They can't officially cry poverty because the district is simply not poor. In fact, LBUSD is on such sound financial footing for the moment that they have to project disastrous figures two to three years into the future to get their Armageddon, at which point any idea of revenues is mostly conjecture.

If they really felt themselves in desperate straits, the most obvious measure to take would be to end the wasteful practice of keeping two principals at every high school. We have the highest paid principals out of the six districts in the state that are comparable to ours in size, and for some reason we are the only ones that see fit to put two of them at every high school site.

This practice speaks to a mindset that says teachers are the problem and that they need more and better enforcers to make them work. This same mindset is enshrined in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which smoothly (if ironically) transitioned into Obama's Race To The Top program (a metaphor which, by definition, would leave some children behind).