AUSD Compensation Project: Q&A With Loring Barker

Loring Barker, who has been teaching in Albany since 1984, has been involved with the Albany Teachers Association for about 12 years. Currently, he is the association's negotiations chair. The following are some highlights taken from a recent interview with Barker.

What kind of sacrifices have teachers made recently for the district to keep a balanced budget?

I think I might say more that teachers make sacrifices on a daily basis over a number of years working with students. Many teachers put in countless hours on evenings and weekends, which is kind of expected of teachers, but it’s still something they do because they care about what they do.

And many teachers spend a lot of their own money—even before state finances went south—on things for the classroom, on reading materials and other materials. I don't know that I would say that sacrifice for the district from teachers is anything new. It’s something teachers have done always because they care about their kids.

Teachers have to make a living just like everyone else. In the past couple of years, there’s been a few times when class sizes have risen, sometimes within the contract, sometimes negotiated extra beyond the contract, to help compensate for some things going on. And basically over the last five or six years, there have been no raises, even though the cost of living has gone up. Last time I calculated it, it went up about 12 percent over that time. So teachers are basically losing ground.

Without raises since 2007, how does that affect teachers' pensions?

The teachers and the district help contribute into the pension fund. We pay about half and the district pays about half, I believe, into the California State Teachers Retirement Fund.

If you have more than 25 years of teaching, your retirement is based on your last year of salary. So if there are no raises, then when you retire, your pension is also stuck at whatever that last year was. So for people that are retiring last year, this year, next year, when there’s no raises, they’re basically retiring on the 2007 or 2008 salary. And when the cost of living has risen 12 percent or more over that time, that’s a real hurt to retirement, because that determines the pay for the rest of your life.

What happened during the this spring?

We talked about a number of things, and it was clear we were not making a lot of progress, and both sides just thought it would be cleaner to continue the present contract, which again meant no salary increase.

The district has quite a large reserve fund, which we also understand in these times of difficult finances—the state is not paying its share and deferring a lot of money—the district needs some larger reserves than normal to cover those costs. At the same time, if the district is building up large reserves, and we’re losing money to the cost of living while there are no raises, at some point we need to start helping our members get through the year, so we were talking about salary increases and the cost of benefits to our members, and the district was talking about the cost of benefits.

How important is it to teachers to keep their benefits?

It is very important to the teachers. It’s something we’ve gone and talked to our members about a number of times... Many of our members have families, and we sort of traded salary increases for full benefits over a long period of time.

We’ve always been kind of a mid- to lower-level salary district, but had good benefits. A lot of the other districts are dropping away, because we haven’t had any raises, but with our benefits being paid, we’re kind of staying level. So it’s not so much that we’re increasing, it’s that the other districts are decreasing away.

We certainly appreciate that our community values education and values teachers, and that, because of the school district, we’ve been able to not have furlough days and we’ve been able to maintain, up to this point, the school year for our kids so that we can maintain a strong program.

How does affect teachers?

Back when the parcel tax was passed originally, one of the big clauses was to attract and retain teachers. So teachers worked very hard to help that parcel tax pass, partly because they wanted to maintain strong programs, but also because we felt that, if you have an attractive dollar and benefits package, people won’t leave. Even though our benefits do attract teachers, we still had a number of people leave. And in some cases, it was because of salary.

When that parcel tax was passed, part of the negotiation was to increase the salary. But because the parcel tax that was passed had a time limit on it, the superintendent at the time, Dr. Wong, would not put the salary on the salary schedule. He said, "I’ll give you a certain amount of the money over the life of the parcel tax." ... That parcel tax is now a perpetual parcel tax, but we’re still being paid this money as if it were a tax that was leaving next year, so that money will go away unless we negotiate something else.

Realistically, what needs to happen in the district to maintain high standard of education?

Sometimes people think it’s magic. I hear this a lot: People say, “Well, we’re just going to have to do more with less.” But that doesn’t really work. You can’t do more with less. You end up doing less with less. Sometimes you can do things a little bit differently, but usually it doesn’t work as well.

I think we have a strong community that values education, I think we’re going to be better off that a lot of other places, but if we as a state don’t figure out how to pay for education, it’s going to be hard. Even right now, we’re barely maintaining, much less really trying to improve. A lot of the parcel tax money that was supposed to go to extra stuff, is really just holding us steady

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