As the manager of a small school district operating under an unforgiving state spending cap, Verona’s Board of Education is constantly looking for ways to better spend limited taxpayer money. But a BOE effort to better manage spending on paraprofessional staff erupted into turmoil late last week.
On Thursday, the BOE sent a letter to the Verona Education Association, our teachers’ union, saying that the BOE was “considering” the outsourcing of both the district’s teacher’s aides and its tech support staff. That was not the letter the VEA had been expecting: It was awaiting a BOE response to its April request to have the aides and tech staff join its union. The outsourcing disclosure was a bombshell that seemed to confirm the job security fears that had arisen among the 68 aides after a meeting with the district’s new head of special education in January. Social media erupted with calls to come to the Tuesday, May 10, BOE meeting to keep the aides from losing their jobs.
Better communication could have gone a long way to calm the storm. Yes, the BOE is considering changes to the management of the paraprofessional staff, but those changes might not be dire. And they might not be incompatible with unionization, which might not have been sought at all had there been better communication with the aides in the first place.
“Since there have not been any discussions in open public board meetings, it is difficult to know when, if ever, outsourcing was discussed,” says Christopher Tamburro, a Verona High School history teacher who is the president of the VEA. “What we do know is that teachers, parents, community members, and the union were never consulted in decisions that will greatly impact each of these stakeholder groups. The lack of transparency involved has bred distrust that will be difficult to resolve. The entire community has the right to know when structural changes are occurring in the schools.”
In January, the aides met with Frank Mauriello, who had replaced Libby Skinner as Verona’s director of special services at the start of the 2015-2016 school year. He was supposed to explain new qualifications that the aides would need once Verona accepted some federal funding for special education: Title I funding would require all aides to have 60 college credits or take a certification test. (The test is expected to cost each aide $80 and study guides could run another $20; maybe more.)
But several aides, who spoke to MyVeronaNJ.com on condition of anonymity, said the meeting did not go well. They came away believing they might not have jobs in the fall even if they met the new credentials. They believed that their salaries, which range from $12.25 to $18 an hour, could all be cut back to $12.25. Compounding their worries: Temp aides from a private company were already showing up in some schools. To protect their jobs, Verona’s teacher aides began to look into unionization. “They were looking for something to define basic working conditions,” says Denise Policastro, the New Jersey Education Association liaison to the VEA. “They have no benefits and no contract to define what is a work day or a work year.”
Aides are a key part of meeting the needs of Verona’s large special education population. Roughly 300 students, or just under 14% of the entire student body, were listed has having a disability in the 2014-2015 school year. The aides, often working one-on-one, help keep these students focused and on task. “Most of these women are extremely dedicated,” says one long-time aide.
Verona has, however, found it increasingly difficult to efficiently manage the aides. Unlike the salaried staff, aides have hours to track. With wages low and benefits nonexistent, turnover can be high–35% in the current school year. (Many of those who left are said to have departed because Verona cut aides’ hours from roughly 32 hours a week to 29.5.) If an aide calls in sick, it can be more difficult to find a replacement than for other employees. To hire a replacement, the district has to post the job, read the resumes, and conduct interviews and background checks. As a result, school districts in New Jersey have been trying to see if private contractors can help. According to a 2009 study by the New Jersey School Boards Association, the most common services subcontracted to private companies were food services, maintenance and transportation, but some districts had already subcontracted teacher aides. Educational staffing companies like Source4Teachers are finding a foothold in New Jersey and across the country.
Now, the intermittent program seems likely to expand. In its letter to the VEA on Thursday and another letter to all aides sent on Monday, the BOE affirmed that it is preparing to seek bids from a number of private contractors to manage all aide work. BOE President John Quattrocchi said Monday that the winning vendor must hire all existing Verona aides who want to work for it and pay them their current salaries. “It is incorrect that aides will take a pay cut,” he said. “We don’t want any more turnover.” Some of the aides who have left Verona have gotten higher salaries working in other towns.
Quattrocchi said that current aides who meet the new certification requirements could continue to work in Verona as employees of the private company, but those who do not get certified could potentially find work elsewhere through the vendor because not every district requires certified aides and the big private contractors operate in multiple districts. The letter sent to the aides also invited them to form their own company to bid on the privatized contract, but that just seemed to further confuse some of the aides who read it. “What does that even mean,” asked one.
In an emailed statement, Superintendent Rui Dionisio sought to allay these fears. “First and foremost, our focus is always on the best interests of our students,” he wrote. “All of our staff are important members of our schools and community. We have communicated that our aim is to keep our current qualified staff in Verona even if outsourcing becomes a viable option. We have a responsibility to our community to engage in a review of our existing practices and ensure we are providing the best services to our students by taking fiscal responsibility and human resource management decisions into consideration. Any decisions that would be made would provide equivalent or better services for our students and their program would not be negatively impacted. Each and every determination we make as a district always maintains our students as our primary focus and central to each decision that is made.”
And what of the unionization request, which the BOE has yet to address? Quattrocchi says that while the BOE cannot say no, it could ask for a formal union vote through the state’s Public Employment Relations Commission, and that unionization would not be incompatible with privatization. After a union vote, the aides would have to negotiate contract terms.
“The Board may be concerned about the unknowns of what paraprofessional and technology staff contracts might contain,” says the VEA’s Tamburro. “However, the details of such agreements can only be determined through formal negotiations. We hope that the Board will voluntarily recognize the paraprofessionals and technology staff into the Association so that we can conduct a negotiation process. At that time, they can learn of the fairness of our proposals.”
If Verona were to let its aides be unionized, it would join the majority of Essex County school districts, according to the NJEA. The union opposes the use of private contractors because it says that privatization can result in lower quality services, accountability problems and higher costs. Quattrocchi admits that a private contract could cost Verona more in salaries paid, but insists that would be offset by a decrease in managerial time.
Despite Monday’s letter, the aides remain wary. “We don’t want to be outsourced,” says one. “We want to stay where we are and have some protection.”
