In the month since Livingston Parish voters rejected a 1-cent sales tax that would have provided a 10% pay raise for school district employees, the school board has pivoted to finding other ways to support staff — but some teachers remain disappointed at the pace of change.
“I don’t think that the school board has alleviated the frustration and concern that teachers and support staff are feeling,” said Tamara Cupit, president of the Livingston Federation of Teachers & School Employees. “We are frustrated with the inability of the school board to make decisions and get things done.”
Over the last few weeks, the school board has approved several measures aimed at easing burdens for teachers — even if an immediate raise remains out of reach.
Some of those measures include ending school a week early, limiting parent-teacher conferences to a teacher’s contracted hours and giving principals the ability to discontinue any non-essential club or activity that happens outside sponsor work hours, among others.
Other efforts are more bureaucratic in nature.
Amid concerns the school board is not properly managing its budget, members have voted to advertise for an independent auditing service of their finances. There is also a plan in the works to conduct an organizational review of the central office.
A task force to find solutions to teacher pay was also recently formed, which will partially address the problem by searching for budget cuts.
Superintendent Alan “Joe” Murphy said this week everyone was “certainly disappointed with the failure of the tax,” and that the rejection has led to school leaders looking for alternatives, some of them temporary.
“The teachers are obviously very, very upset, and very disappointed. They want us to explore every avenue that we possibly can,” he said. “They’re looking for two things: Pay or time.”
‘A lot of distrust’
Murphy, who has been in many respects the face of the contentious 1-cent sales tax, said he attributes the failure of the proposal to a number of things.
“I do think there is a heavy nontax, no-tax sentiment in Livingston Parish,” he said. “We’re a very, very conservative parish, and I understand that. We knew starting into this getting a sales tax passed would not be an easy thing.”
He said officials did their best to be transparent during the tax campaign, such as answering questions and building a website describing how the tax could impact the average Livingston Parish resident.
For teachers represented by the most visible union in the parish, the answer to why the tax failed looks slightly different.
“During the election, we did what we could to help with the ballot measure, but the District brought us into the process very late in the game,” said Cupit, the LFT president. “We weren’t able to help with community messaging or help draft the proposal, and I think that lack of collaboration is part of the reason why it failed.”
Maegan Howes, a member of the union, recently spoke during a school board committee meeting during a discussion of the task force to find a solution to teacher pay.
“A tax proposal will only be successful if we rebuild trust amongst the staff and the community at large,” she said. “We want to be a part of this task force because we think it’s important for transparency’s sake.”
Cupit, too, acknowledged there remains “a lot of distrust between staff and district leadership.”
Some frustrations include teachers continuing to be expected to work long hours outside the school day without additional pay, and that their planning time is often interrupted when they are called to cover classes.
“However, the biggest issue that I hear from teachers and staff every day is still that the pay is too low for the work we put in,” Cupit said.
‘We’d just like to be competitive’
Cecil Harris, president of the parish school board, maintains everyone needs to trust the process and keep their emotions in check around such a polarizing issue.
“Nothing’s going to take the place of getting a raise. That was the ultimate goal, and could still be,” he said. “But you know, we’ve got a good school district and people are upset about what happened. Everybody needs to just take a deep breath and slow down and stop and let us try to figure this out.”
The task force, which Murphy said will gather information and report to a third-party consultant, has yet to formally name its members. The question of a 4-day work week, or even a modified work week, is also on the table — what Murphy called “a hot topic” among employees.
Harris said plainly the district is not trying to compete with Ascension Parish, often pointed to as the gold standard of teacher pay in the area: “We’d just like to be competitive,” he added.
The Livingston Federation of Teachers union says it has found several million dollars in surplus funds they want allocated for a raise — a claim Murphy categorically denied, even sending a formal rebuttal this week because he said the information is causing “a lot of unnecessary grief” for employees and school board members. And the union wants a seat at the table for the task force, but its leaders say they haven’t gotten a response from task force officials.
Harris said he understands why teachers are upset but believes their anger is misdirected.
“They can’t blame us. We’re the ones that went to the public with a tax to get them a raise. I don’t understand why everyone’s trying to come down on us,” Harris said. “You can’t bleed blood out of a turnip.”
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