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[Hilary]

NEWS RELEASE – ROCHESTER CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT
Date: April 13, 2010
 
Superintendent Brizard Announces
Voluntary Cut of $10,000 to His Salary

Personal Giveback Underscores Need for Shared Sacrifice in Light of
$61 Million Budget Gap
 
(ROCHESTER, NY) Acknowledging the difficult budget decisions facing the Rochester City School District this year, Superintendent of Schools Jean-Claude Brizard tonight announced to the Board of Education that he is voluntarily giving back $10,000 of his salary for 2010-11.
“It’s symbolic more than anything else, but perhaps we can lead by example,” Brizard said.
        Brizard’s announcement followed a suggestion made by Board Commissioner Van White at a budget deliberation meeting of the Board’s Finance Committee of the Whole. White suggested that Board members, the Superintendent, and his top administrative staff consider taking voluntary pay cuts given the $61 million budget deficit facing the district for 2010-11.
Brizard said he would ask his top administrative staff to consider taking a voluntary reduction and ask unions to consider taking no raises and a freeze on step increases in 2010-11 to save jobs.
 
Budget Proposal Includes Staffing Cuts Across the Board

        In his budget proposal to the Board, Brizard has outlined numerous cost-cutting measures to balance the budget given declining State revenue and increased expenses, including contractual increases of more than $9 million in salaries for the district’s employee unions.


Brizard’s budget proposal includes staffing cuts that would impact every union and the non-union Superintendent’s Employee Group. After vacancies are eliminated, staff reductions by employee unit are as follows:

〈         Administrators: 10%
〈         Superintendent’s Employee Group: 8%
〈         Non-teaching employees: 6%
〈         Teachers: 3%
〈         Paraprofessionals: Less than 1%
 
The reductions represent a total workforce reduction of 4% and a school-based reduction of 2.5%
Other cost-cutting measures called for in the Superintendent’s budget proposal for 2010-11 include:
Ø     Reducing non-school operating budgets by 40%
Ø     Removing vacancies for 2010-11
Ø     Reducing programs by 30%
Ø     Reducing school operating budgets (TAPU) by 10%
Ø     Using reserves from the district’s Fund Balance
                                             

[beanqueen]

Vicky Bouvia (sp?), head of the Administrator's Union (ASAR ) spoke  at Monday night's Public Hearing on the Budget.

She said that of the 49 Administrator positions being cut, 31 of them are in schools: people who deal with students on a daily basis. 

Only 18 of them come from Central Office.

[Hilary]

D&C story:

Struggling to make up a projected $61 million budget deficit and facing decisions on hundreds of layoffs, four Rochester school board members said Wednesday that they plan to take a voluntary 10 percent pay cut from their board salaries for next school year.
At a budget meeting Tuesday night, board member Van White said he would be willing to forfeit some pay next year and wondered whether his colleagues and top district staff would do the same. On Wednesday, board President Malik Evans and members Melisza Campos and Allen Williams all said they would take the same step.

School board members are paid an annual salary of $22,981 for the part-time job. The board president is paid $30,481. While some board members said they hoped the gesture would encourage district unions to make concessions, the teachers union leader said he was unmoved.

Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard was the first to take White up on his idea, when he said Tuesday night he would take a $10,000 pay cut for the next school year, representing between 4 percent and 5 percent of his salary. Brizard will make $223,600 this calendar year. His contract expires at the end of the year, and Evans said negotiations on a new contract have begun.

"I think my team would be more than happy to have this conversation, but I also want to see some good faith on the other side as well, too," Brizard said Tuesday night, citing a vacant position in the school board's section of the budget that he said should be eliminated. By the end of the meeting, he said he'd take a cut.

Combined, the salary cuts promised so far total less than $20,000 in savings.

If every board member and Superintendent's Employee Group worker in the district takes a similar pay cut, Brizard said at the meeting Tuesday night, the district could save about $200,000. The SEG is a group of 51 non-union top officials and support staff.

The $200,000, White said, is more than symbolic. It could save two or three administrators or teachers.

"I didn't want to put my colleagues in an awkward position," White said Wednesday. "(But) I've always thought that we should lead by example."

Asked about the pay cut, board member Cynthia Elliott said the board should move to make more meaningful cuts at the top of the district's salary structure before discussing symbolic pay cuts.

"I'm not interested in having that discussion ... until the board eliminates some of those positions within SEG," she said. "What is that going to do other than be symbolic? We need to make some real cuts."

"I've already made my sacrifice," said board member Willa Powell. "My first term on the board, I put half my salary toward scholarships for RCSD graduates."

Powell said she was "a tiny bit annoyed" that Brizard was asking board members to eliminate the vacancy in their staff budget because it's an important auditing job.

"It's not a very generous budget. We long ago cut out the things we thought of as niceties," Powell said of the section of the budget allocated to the board.

Board member Jose Cruz could not be reached for comment.

White said the gesture at the board level and among top officials might help convince teachers, administrators and other unionized workers to forgo some portion of the pay raises they are contractually due.

"Maybe that gives you an opportunity to have some dialogue with the unions," White said at the meeting Tuesday night. "By exercising this kind of leadership, we create conversations."

"I don't know if we'll be able to use it as leverage," Evans said Wednesday. "But we've got a tough road ahead, so we've got to sacrifice."

"I remain unimpressed," Rochester Teachers Association President Adam Urbanski said of the pay cuts. "First of all, since when is a public school district a matter of charity? I think that this predictable and calculated gimmick is a poor substitute for effective management and good leadership."

Urbanski said freezing teacher pay would mean Rochester would "end up with teachers who can't get jobs anywhere else." He called the budget being considered the worst in his 30-year tenure.

"I think it's good," Williams said of the board members' pay cuts. "But I think it has to be mandatory. Not only for the board and board staff, but the whole SEG group."

Williams said he'd push for a 10 percent or 20 percent cut in the board's budget and the SEG budget, and let Brizard figure out how to make the cut. But he said he'd take the cut regardless of the outcome of that effort.

NRAMOS@DemocratandChronicle.com

[Hilary]

WHAM blog by Rachel Barnhart:

Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard has been touting the fact his budget spreads the pain, equally targeting administrators and lower-level workers.

The budget cuts 6 percent of BENTE workers, 3 percent of teachers, less than 1 percent of paraprofessionals, while cutting 8 percent of the Superintendent Employee Group and 10 percent of the administrators union.

These administrator reductions must be put into perspective.

First, let’s look at the Superintendent Employee Group. Brizard took over a cabinet that had 37 administrators and secretaries in 2008. Today, there are 51. My most recent data is from five months ago, when there were 50 SEG members. (This means Brizard has added a position during the budget crisis.) Brizard has increased the payroll of this group by more than $1.5 million over the last two years. The fact he is cutting four positions must be looked at in this context. (I asked which positions would be cut, and was told it "hasn't been announced internally yet.")

Second, let’s look at the Administrators and Supervisors Association of Rochester. The union has 409 members. Between 100 and 110 of them are civil service managers who work at Central Office. Fewer than a dozen of those managers are targeted by layoffs. Thirty-one of the 40 layoffs will impact school administrators. “How can you say cutting 31 building-based administrators are keeping cuts way from children?” asked Vickie Gouveia, president of ASAR. Some of those laid off were teachers in the district for many years who gave up seniority to become administrators. Gouveia said one of the first-year administrators who will lose his job was a teacher for 24 years.

Finally, the vast majority of the Central Office cuts will not be coming from the ranks of administrators. Brizard said 100 jobs will leave Central Office. Who are these people, if they’re not in ASAR and SEG? I was skeptical the first time Brizard said he cut 130 jobs from Central Office. I’m skeptical this time. When I asked the remaining unions how many jobs they have lost and are about to lose from Central Office, the numbers don't add up.

One more thing – I still find it appalling that a district-wide FTE summary is not available in the district’s budget document. I also find it appalling that Brizard – nor any superintendent in recent history – has never included a line item in his budget for the SEG. How can the board vote on a budget without knowing how much the superintendent is spending on his cabinet and without knowing how many people are in the cabinet?

[SKuykendall]

It sometimes seems like the school district has so much to deal with that making information public is not a priority -- but I do think that, in the case of budgeting, readily available information would be helpful in terms of fiscal discipline. 

In particular, Rachel Barnhart's comment that between 100 and 110 of the ASAR members are managers who work in Central Office was interesting.  It's one of those things that makes you wonder whether maybe, if the public were to scrutinize the org chart, focused, rational, and specific pressure for reform might emerge.  If we were all to scrutinize the org chart, surely it would be clear that either all of those 110 ASAR members had essential jobs in the Central Office -- or it would be clear that some of the positions needed to be abolished.

If the public has a good sense of the details surrounding budgetary choices, there might be less opportunity for political turmoil and drama, for in-fighting and frightening accusations. 

After all, how much public ire could anyone raise if the Superintendent were to abolish the Chief of Cursive and Metric System Education (hypothetically speaking)?  On the other hand, it would very clearly become obvious that abolishing a position like Director of School Safety was problematic and unpopular.

It's kind of like the mayoral-control question -- no one knows, specifically, what the mayor would do and similarly no one knows, specifically, what those opposed to mayoral control will do to address the clearly unacceptable status quo -- and so all the unverifiable accusations and counter-accusations wind up absorbing our attention. 

(On the one hand, the mayor will limit parental involvement, he will privatize the school district, he will be replaced by someone the voters all hate; on the other hand, we are told that the status quo will prevail forever without mayoral control, those opposed to mayoral control will continue to insist that our only hope for urban children rests on the possibility of an economic miracle or an equally miraculous decision on the part of suburban districts to amalgamate with the urban one, the schools will be inaccessible to neighborhood residents and no one will take responsibility for outcomes.)

On a separate note, I like the fact that the Superintendent and some of the school board members are voluntarily taking pay cuts -- I think it quite eloquently makes the relevant point that, hey, raises are not simply something that everyone expects, even in the midst of a budgetary crisis.

As far as the suggestion that freezing teacher pay would leave the city with teachers who "can't get jobs elsewhere," I am just curious about the annual increases in pay that other districts are handing out.  Does anyone know whether any of the suburban districts have also cut back on annual increases in pay?  It would seem like there might be a lot of that going on, given the budgetary shortfalls -- and especially since suburban voters do actually vote on school-district budgets.

Santosha

[Hilary]

Santosha

That's a good question - I haven't heard of ANY teachers in the area (or in NY) taking pay freezes/cuts.  (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) I think it would have made the news if they did. Ideally, I think, any freeze would come as a broad statewide move.

[Ms. R]

I appreciate the board members willingness to give back a portion of their salary. I think many others should follow suit. It seems very arrogant for someone to say they're unwilling to consider the idea...sounds like that person may have no concern about their position being put on the chopping block, until it is. Having a job that pays slightly less is better than not having a job at all.