![]() That $30 million represents about 10% of MDUSD’s budget (using round numbers for simplicity). Agreements with the other employee groups (bus drivers, custodians, office managers, etc.) resulted in equivalent yearly costs. We catapulted teacher compensation from being second to last in the county to being in the top 5. We had approximately 1,500 teachers at the time- increasing their compensation by an average of $10,000 (combination of salary and benefits) meant $15 million dollars annually. The resulting multi-year agreements in 2014 were both retroactive and added new costs each year.Īs a Board, we knew that the reserve would go down as we invested in our own employees. While the bargaining teams negotiated on the contracts, the budget reserve built up. These were the same employees who had been hit with furloughs, layoffs, pay cuts and reduced hours during the budget crisis of 2008-2009. ![]() Our Board prioritized raising compensation for all employees and restoring medical benefits for teachers. and nothing is more important to a great education than having great teachers. The result was that it was incredibly difficult for MDUSD to attract or retain teachers…. Even worse, teachers did not have medical benefits- their own union (MDEA) had negotiated that away in a previous contract. When I joined the Board in 2012, MDUSD teachers were second to last in the county in compensation. You may have heard that MDUSD had a $90 million reserve but now the District is in financial trouble- let’s explore that. If you’d like a deeper dive and pretty graphs on CA education funding, I recommend this article. Diablo has additional challenges based on being squarely in the middle- just below the threshold of low-income students to receive additional funding as part of the state’s Local Control Funding Formula and lacking a parcel tax that nearby districts (San Ramon, Acalanes, etc.) have in place. Recent funding increases helped with that some, but those increases have been negated by higher costs (especially in mandated contributions to shore up underfunded employee retirement programs) and the higher cost of living- a $70k salary goes a lot further in Arkansas than it does in the Bay Area. Until just a couple of years ago, California ranked in the lowest of 20% of state funding on a per pupil basis. There is really no excuse for it considering we are the 5th largest economy in the world and one of the most highly taxed states (the rare trifecta of having income, property and sales tax). Search for: Follow This, That, and the Other on WordPress.California consistently and drastically underfunds public education. So consider this post to be a formal apology to my late father for thinking that he was speaking gibberish when he talked about people who were jibber-jabbering.Īnd with that, I think that I will stop jibber-jabbering right now.Ī B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z It turns out that my father did not, in fact, concoct the word “jibber-jabber.” The word “gibberish” dates back to the mid 1500s and was actually an adaptation of “jibber-jabber.”Īnd none other than Lewis Carroll capitalized on the meaning of the word “jabber” (talking rapidly and excitedly but with little sense) in his nonsense-based, epic-style poem “Jabberwocky,” which first appeared in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (his sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) in 1871. I was embarrassed because I thought my father, who was an immigrant, had heard the word “gibberish” and had replaced the actual word with his own made-up, but similar sounding concoction, “jibber-jabber.”īut yesterday, when I was drawing a blank about what “J-word” to use for today’s A to Z Challenge, I Googled “words that start with J,” and, lo and behold, there was “jibber-jabber.” He looked at me quizzically and said, “You mean talking gibberish, right?” ![]() I never gave the term “jibber-jabber” much thought outside of my father’s use of it until one day when I whispered to a friend of mine at a school assembly that someone who was speaking was jibber-jabbering away. I just knew intuitively that, to him, jibber-jabber was foolish or worthless talk, or, essentially, nonsense. ![]() I never bothered to ask him what jibber-jabbering actual was. When I was a kid, my father, who was a very opinionated man, used to accuse anyone who expressed opinions with which he disagreed to be jibber-jabbering. ![]()
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