MBUTA discusses school year changes at first meeting

Kyra Williams

News Editor

Members of the Manhattan Beach United Teachers Association met on Oct. 4 in the Mira Costa small theater, to discuss changes that Costa’s administration implemented for this school year.

MBUTA is the teachers’ union for the Manhattan Beach Unified School District’s certificated employees. The union works to represent its members in contract negotiations and official relations with the district. MBUTA meets monthly to discuss possible ideas or issues they have with contracts or the administration, MBUTA President and English teacher Shawn Chen said.

“Teachers employment is governed by our contractual agreement and if the district or any administrators violate our contract we get to file a grievance in order to be treated in accordance with our contract,” Chen said.

Staff members discussed possible grievances at their meeting, regarding the new schedule changes implemented this school year and union issues, Chen said. Teachers advocated for the importance of having order and process when scheduling classes, which has been ignored this year, Chen said.

According to Chen, MBUTA proposed the idea that the schedule going forward should be reviewed by teachers prior to acceptance by the administration. Mira Costa Principal Ben Dale had promised this last year, however, the scheduling committee failed to follow that process, Chen said.

“In the past, whenever we have had a schedule change, we have gone through the process in our contract which says that schedule changes need to be approved by both the district administrators and the union,” Chen said. “This year we didn’t go through that process.”

MBUTA advocated for staff meetings to be implemented on the calendar this year, due to the limited number scheduled for the 2016-17 school year. Teachers discussed scheduling meetings after school on minimum days during Ed Council, but no agreement was made before the implementation of this year’s schedule.

“We would like to have meetings as frequently as they are needed just to keep the staff updated and informed,” Chen said. “It just seems like if there’s an issue or if something happened [in the past], we would get everything done by email, so we really want to meet face-to-face because we just don’t think that email is a very effective way to build staff morale.”

According to Costa English teacher Diana Sieker, administration has not given the union a concrete reason as to why the minimum schedule has been extended from 12:21 p.m. to 1:02 p.m.

“Teachers deserve to know the rationale behind such an unexpected and seemingly inexplicable change,” Sieker said.

Costa staff met on Wednesday regarding the communication between the Aeries and Canvas programs. MBUTA met yesterday at lunch, however, the topics of conversation were not available at the time of publication.

“We have had very little training,” Sieker said. “It was basically a half an hour training session in which they taught us how to press absent and tardy, without learning any of the other features.”