Board elects Rimga Viskanta as President, Jane Lea Smith as Vice President, and Phan Anderson as Clerk.
Board approves a $434,198 increase in healthcare subsidy to certificated teaching staff.
The new Board likely violated Brown Act laws.
The Board approved a budget update with a forecasted budget deficit of $7.2 million for the current school year.

The Board of Trustees of SDUHSD held a board meeting on Tuesday, December 13, 2022. This first meeting of the new Board after the November elections introduced three new Trustees: Rimga Viskanta, Jane Lea Smith, and Phan Anderson.

Although it was a lengthy agenda, only three items might be of significant interest to the public: The election of the President, Vice President, and Clerk of the Board; an update of the District’s budget; and a proposed increase in the health benefits provided to our teachers and certificated staff members.

Election of Board Officers

Because outgoing Trustee Mo Muir was the President of the Board and I was the Vice President, I became the Acting President for this Board Meeting until a new Board President was elected.

Unfortunately, things got off to a rocky start right away. The first order of business is to approve the agenda, and some Trustees suggested changes to the agenda. New Trustee Phan Anderson asked that the proposed increase for teacher health care subsidy be tabled until the next meeting because she did not feel she had enough information to make an informed decision. I respect her position (especially since this is the first meeting for her and two other Trustees), and I agree that the Board and the public were not provided with adequate information regarding this item. ISI Douglas confirmed that we could postpone this item, and that there was no dire urgency requiring a decision at this meeting. Nevertheless, the Board consensus was 3-2 that this remain on the Agenda, so it did stay and was voted on later in the meeting.

What happened next was shocking and disappointing for many and showed both a profound lack of understanding of the law regarding public meetings and an utter disdain for public opinion and participation.

Board Members Katrina Young and Rimka Viskanta wanted to change the order of the agenda so that the election of board officers would occur earlier in the meeting. I placed this item near the end of the agenda so that I, as an experienced Board Member, could run the meeting legally and efficiently. Also, the new Board President would then have more than a month to work with the Superintendent to structure the next meeting, learn how meetings are conducted, have their questions answered, etc. Electing the Board President early in the meeting would require that they immediately take over and run the remainder of this meeting. This is, apparently, what Trustees Viskanta and Young wanted to do. At the time, I wasn’t sure why they wanted to do that, but I think that became clear later in the meeting.

In any event, it is generally within the discretion of the Board to adjust the agenda (within certain parameters), and they did so to make the election of officers the first order of business. However, by law, the public must be allowed to comment on any action or discussion item either before or during the discussion of the item. The Board cannot, as a matter of law, consider an item without giving the public a chance to comment.

Nevertheless, Trustees Young and Viskanta were adamant that the vote for officers take place before public comments. Some members of the public wanted to speak about these action items before the vote and they were denied their right to do so. This is a violation of the Brown act and is illegal.

You can watch a recording of the meeting here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvAENh2pdPQ

and this discussion begins at 27:45 on the video, but I will also briefly summarize what happened.

When the proposal was made to move the election of officers earlier in the meeting, I placed it just after public comments. ISI Douglas also confirmed that the Board must allow the public to speak before elections take place. I even went so far as to ask our attorney about changing the agenda, and she informed the Board that we must at least take public comments on agenda items before voting for the Board leadership positions. Trustee Young then stated that listening to the public is important, but we can hear from them after we make our decision and vote. New Board Member Viskanta also stated that it was up to the Board to decide the order of the Agenda, and if they wanted to put it before public comments, they can do so.

I have never witnessed a Board ignore legal advice on something as straight-forward as this, and I have participated in hundreds of board meetings on well over 20 different boards during my career. Worse, this was an easily preventable mistake, the law is very clear on this issue, and Trustees Young and Viskanta were warned multiple times during the meeting that it is not appropriate to place a board action item before the public is allowed to comment on the item.

In the end the Board voted to change the agenda to vote for officers before allowing for public comment. Rimga Viskanta was elected as President, Jane Lea Smith Vice President, and Phan Anderson Clerk. We still have the problem of the Brown Act violation by not allowing public comment before or during this agenda item. To correct this, we will have to redo the vote at a future meeting in a process called Cure and Correct.

District Budget

ISI Douglas took the Board through an updated interim budget. In summary, we are forecasting a net loss (deficit) of about $7.2 million for the current school year in our “unrestricted” accounts, which are our main operating accounts, and a budget surplus of about $2.1 million for the next school year. Importantly, our forecast for the next school year does not take into consideration the current state of the California State budget. We know that the State is projecting a deficit for the first time in several years, and this may put pressure on the amount of funding provided to public schools. I will not be surprised if in the next few months our updated forecast for the 2023/2024 school year also shows a budget deficit. We simply must get our financial house in order and find a way to stop spending more money than we receive, or we will be in significant financial trouble.

Which brings me to the third item of interest.

Increase in Health Benefits

Our contract with the Teachers Union requires us to provide a subsidy to help defray the costs of healthcare insurance premiums. For the 2022 calendar year we provided $4,062.24 per person as a subsidy. As an illustration, if an employee chose a plan that costs $10,062.24 per year, the District would cover $4,062.24 of that cost and the employee would be responsible for the additional $6,000.00. If the employee chose a more or less expensive healthcare plan, they would pay more or less than $6,000, but in any case, the District would subsidize the first $4,062.24 of cost.

The contract we have with the Teachers Union also commits us to increasing the subsidy each calendar year based on the increase in cost of our healthcare plans.

In addition, the Teachers Union has a right to “ask” for more than that minimum increase. The District does not have to grant any additional money over and above the minimum increase, but the Teachers Union can ask for more, and if they do then we as the District must at least meet and hear them out and talk about it. But we do not have to give them more than the contractually required increase. Any increase must be approved by the Board.

In this Board Meeting, staff brought forward a proposal to approve an increase in the healthcare insurance subsidy beyond the minimum required increase. The proposal was to move from a subsidy of $4,062.24 per year per person, to $4,872.47 for next year, an increase of $810.07 per person.

It is up to our Board to approve this additional increase or not. We can approve this increase if we want to, but we aren’t required to approve it. That is what we were supposed to debate during this meeting. Unfortunately, things again went sideways very quickly.

The problems started when the agenda came out and the supporting material provided was only the proposed new language of the contract and a summary of the financial impact on the budget of the District, as confirmed by ISI Douglas. No materials were provided to show the true financial impact to our district. For example, the proposed increase was $810.07 per person, but how many people are covered? What is the total increase across the entire District? How much of that proposed $810.07 increase is mandatory based on the labor contract, and how much is discretionary?

To ensure that the public is fully informed, I created a simple table that clarifies the situation. Here is the table, and it is easy to understand.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11_1i07oayCBuXaGJnhEGXmmypysHpeE1/view?usp=share_link

This year we provide a subsidy of $4,062.40 per person for 536 people, for a total cost of $2,177,446. By contract we must increase that by $250.00 per person to $4,312.40 per year, an increase of $134,000 in total for 536 employees. The Union’s ask was an increase of $810.07 per person to $4,872.47, which is an increase of $434,198 in total.

Of course, we want to be transparent and have the public understand this before we make our decision. We have a location on the Board Meeting website to put additional information provided after the Board Agenda is finalized. The District published a document of my Proposed Goals (a different agenda item) that I sent the Board, for example, but they did not publish this table and they didn’t make it available to the public. You can see this here under “Materials” for this Board meeting.

https://www.sduhsd.net/Our-District/Board-of-Trustees/Meeting-AgendasMinutes/2022-2023/index.html

I encourage you to watch the video of the meeting starting at 4:53:30. The display of poor governance is simply astounding.

First, Trustee Viskanta tried to frame the Board’s decision as a “non-decision”, saying that the role of negotiating this pay increase belongs to a team containing both District and Teachers Union staff, and that once this team agrees, the role of the Board is to accept the agreement – essentially be a rubber stamp. This is not true. The Board – this Board, not the prior Board – must approve this extra pay for the teachers or it cannot be paid. It is completely incorrect to imply that our Board MUST approve this additional pay.

Second, you will see that the Board voted for this teacher pay increase without knowing the total amount of the increase they were approving. This bears repeating. The Board approved a pay increase without understanding the total amount of the increase.

My table above highlights the cost. We are required by our labor contract to pay an additional $250 per person, or $134,000 for our existing 536 employees. The “ask” from the Union was an increase of $810.07 per person, or $434,198 for 536 employees. This is $300,198 more than we are required to provide.

I tried to get these numbers in front of the public several times. I asked staff during the meeting to confirm the numbers, but they were interrupted by Trustee Viskanta before they answered. I tried, twice, to present the table of numbers during the meeting, but Trustee Viskanta prevented me from showing the data.

The most fundamental rule of a governing body like a school board is that elected members are free to speak as they wish on a topic under consideration by the body, and they must be allowed to speak. The President can’t censor someone because they don’t agree with what they might say.

Boards must behave professionally, legally, and with good governance. Our three new Board members emphasized a commitment to good governance and transparency in their campaigns and I have also publicly maintained a commitment to the same. This was a rocky start for this new Board.