VISTAVISTA — The Vista teachers’ union, already at an ime with the Vista Unified School District over future pay and benefits, began voting Monday on authorization to call a strike — the second time such a vote has been taken in Vista since the Great Recession choked off educational funding to local school districts.
The two sides are locked in a dispute over how much of a raise more than 1,300 teachers in Vista Unified should receive. The union, called the Vista Teachers Association, is seeking a 6 percent increase in pay while the school district says it has offered a one-time bonus-like payment of 3.21 percent and ongoing raise of 2.19 percent.
A few hundred teachers attended the strike authorization vote meeting at Vista Magnet Middle School’s gymnasium on Monday.
A mediator from Public Employment Relations Board, which is a quasi-judicial istrative agency charged with istering collective bargaining statutes covering employees of California’s public schools and other state agencies, was appointed last month to help resolve the dispute.
Loretta van der Pol, chief of the board’s State Mediation & Conciliation Service, declined to comment on the confidential discussions.
“Quite often, the sides don’t agree on the money amounts. That’s probably one of the most common things we see in mediation,” van der Pol said. “Every case is dynamic. Discussions can sometimes go around the clock, or for several months. It depends on the size of the district.”
Brett Killeen, assistant superintendent in charge of human resources with Vista Unified, said the district and union have plans to meet with the mediator on Tuesday. He indicated that the union and Vista Unified have declared imes in negotiations almost every year in the last decade. “This is nothing new,” Killeen said. “We are pleased that good things are happening in the schools and that teachers are doing a good job.”
Patrick Emaus, a spokesman for the teachers union, said that the main goal of teachers is to recover their cost-of-living wages that Vista Unified did not pay from 2007 to 2012, when many school districts were reeling from the Great Recession’s budgetary cuts imposed by state government. In May 2014, the teachers union last voted for strike authorization in tense negotiations for a three-year deal that eventually led to a retroactive 3.28 percent pay raise in the 2013-2014 school year, and a 6.26 percent raise in the 2014-2015 school year.
Contract negotiations were reopened on wage and benefits this current school year, according to Emaus and Killeen.
The union wants to eventually recover its cost-of-living adjustments that it lost in the five-year period 2007 to 2012, and has a plan on how to get their by 2021.
Emaus said that it is unlikely that any strike would take place prior to Jan. 1.
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