One teacher on working over winter break: ‘I feel disrespected, undervalued and demoralized’

By Holly Dillemuth, Ashland.news

Becky DeSalvo, a science teacher at Ashland High, said between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, she worked 56 hours outside of her contract time to pack up mostly district-owned items from her classroom to move to a different building due to the renovations related to the school bond.

DeSalvo was one of the school district staffers who spoke up during a public comment period at Ashland School Board on Thursday regarding alleged labor grievances. The evening also included a vote to approve $1.3 million in cuts to classified and administrative staff, due to the loss of 300 students, equivalent to $3 million, and federal funding provided during the COVID-19 pandemic to help sustain appropriate staffing levels.

“On Saturday, Dec. 16, I spent 10 hours unpacking into my (new) classroom … with three great students who spent five of those hours helping me,” DeSalvo said.

DeSalvo needed to move rooms due to renovations occurring related to the school district’s multi-million-dollar bond project.

“On Jan. 1, I spent 10 more hours unpacking additional boxes that got moved on Dec. 18 into my (new) classroom, so I could be ready to teach the next day,” she added. “In my 23 years working at Ashland High School, I’ve never felt more stressed as I did during those weeks. Now the district is refusing to acknowledge that I had to unpack during winter break. There is no other time I could have done that.

“I’m not sure how I could have taught an AP Physics class at 8:30 in the morning on Monday (Jan. 2)  if I had not come in during my winter break,” she added.

“Each time the district repeats that we were not required to unpack over winter break, I feel disrespected, undervalued, and demoralized,” she added. “The lack of acknowledgment at the district level is appalling. I don’t believe the district understands what they are doing to teacher morale.”

DeSalvo said she and others were not paid the proper wage (she claims they should be paid the difference between what’s known as a “committee rate” and “contract rate”) as determined by their contract and that to do so would cost the district a little more than $1,000.

“The fact that the district is unwilling to acknowledge our commitment to our students is like a smack in the face,” she said.

Marissa Watson has served as a teacher at Ashland High School for the past 12 years.

Watson said she was “deeply troubled” by the need to work over winter break to move the contents of her old classroom to her new one, at a rate below what was agreed to in her negotiated contract.

“Despite my 12 years of service, I find it insulting that the district has chosen to not pay me at my contract rate for the work I performed over winter break,” Watson said. “This is a significant difference in pay. I want to emphasize that I made every effort, every effort not to work over winter break, however, despite all my planning, I was unable to achieve this goal, due to circumstances out of my control.” 

Watson said most of her class was packed and ready to relocate on Friday, Dec. 8, a full week before the end of school before winter break. Her goal was to unpack that week.

Watson said she asked the district for moving assistance and said her boxes were not moved until after Dec. 15.

“It is my belief that the movers were overwhelmed, possibly due to the influx of boxes from the Science Department and did not get to the boxes in the Math Department,” she said. “Despite my best efforts, I left for the holiday break knowing that my new classroom remained unpacked, leaving me with no choice but to work over winter break, which should have been a period of rest and rejuvenation.”

Watson also alleges that she and others were not paid by the district for relocating items from a shared teacher space.

“I asked to be paid for four hours of packing and four hours of unpacking,” she said. “It took me about 10 hours to pack the space. Regrettably, my request for an additional eight hours of pay was denied. I got paid zero dollars for this amount of time … I must express my disappointment and sense of disrespect at the lack of consideration shown by our superintendent handling these matters. As educators, we dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to the betterment of our students and our school community and it’s disheartening to feel undervalued, underpaid, and overlooked in return.”

Ashland Superintendent Samuel Bogdanove defends the district’s decision to pay them at their “committee” rate versus their “contract” hourly rate.

“One of the issues we inherited in the bond is there had not been any planning for paying staff to pack or unpack their classrooms,” Bogdanove said. “So back when we realized this, we negotiated with the union to compensate staff for packing and unpacking and to pay them additional if they were required to be there on a weekend. In the case of the folks at the high school and in the science classroom, they fell under all of that and were being compensated committee rate, which is $30 an hour. They felt because they had to come in over winter break that they should be paid at their contract rate.”

Bogdanove said contract could be anywhere from $32 an hour to $50 an hour depending on how much experience a teacher has. 

“It’s packing and unpacking, why should one person get $45 or $48 an hour and another person get $30 (an hour)?” he said.

“Under the current agreement, they’re being paid appropriately,” he said. “They want something different.”

He also believes that teachers had enough time to plan for moving classrooms due to the bond renovations.

“We worked to let folks know well ahead of time and all of those agreements are spelled out,” Bogdanove said. “The Science Department had 90 substitute hours to give them time to move the common spaces.”

Ashland Education Association, the local branch of Oregon Education Association, the teacher’s union, has asked to meet with the Ashland School Board.

“They (AEA) have asked to talk to the board,” Bogdanove said. “They haven’t indicated what they want to talk about, but I anticipate it will be their concerns over the district’s role in the budget deficit, in advance of bargaining.”

The district has begun negotiations with the teacher’s union and will begin negotiations with the classified union in March, Bogdanove said.

When asked about the likelihood of a strike this spring, either with teachers or with classified staff, Bogdanove said: “There’s always a potential for that, but I don’t see us being there yet.

“I think that aside from this, we have a pretty strong history of collaboration,” he added. “Throughout the state, districts that have a better ending fund balance have been able to settle on contracts that better address the inflation that everybody’s experienced and we’re not in a position to do that unless we further reduce our staffing beyond what we might desire to do.”

Related story: Ashland School Board cuts at least $1.3 million from budget, including athletic director and up to two dozen classified staffers

Reach Ashland.news reporter Holly Dillemuth at hollyd@ashland.news.