School Board moves toward reducing public comment, gives raises to administrators, makes staffing cuts, and votes to partner with the City on a stadium at Citizens Field

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the May 6 School Board of Alachua County meeting, the board moved toward reducing public comment, gave 1.3% raises to administrators by a narrow 3-2 vote, made staffing cuts, and voted to send a letter to the City of Gainesville, indicating their interest in acquiring the Citizens Field property to renovate or build a stadium.

Teachers’ union update

During the teachers’ union update, ACEA President Carmen Ward said there have been a lot of rumors about “cutting positions and cutting days and cutting people’s salaries by a lot,” and several school district employees would be speaking during the meeting.

ACEA Service Unit Director and Vice President Crystal Tessman said the union believes that the proposed staffing plan (see full discussion below) would be “illegal… without first negotiating with ACEA.” She said positions cannot be reduced from 12-month to 11-month positions and work hours cannot be reduced unilaterally. She said the union is particularly concerned about four positions: Assistant, Senior – Clerical; Aide – Clerical, Guidance; Specialist – Student Services; and Para I – General/Instructional. All of these had reductions in work days or work hours in the new Staffing Manual. Tessman asked the board to “remove the unlawful items from the board’s agenda so that all legally mandated preliminaries may be completed prior to board action.”

Board Attorney David Delaney said he was “confident that the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement, including the provisions that relate to reductions in force, are still in effect.” He said the district would be “happy to have a conversation with our partners at ACEA” about the planned reduction in force.

Superintendent Comments

During Superintendent Comments, Superintendent Kamela Patton acknowledged “the deep concern… about school allocations and staffing reductions.” She said the projected deficit for the next fiscal year is now $20 million, and “in response, we’ve been working diligently to find a balance between making necessary financial adjustments while impacting less people.” She emphasized that the district is “eliminating positions – positions – not reducing calendars or hours, completely eliminating positions that will total approximately $4 million. Schools… will reduce positions or work hours by about $8 million. Additionally, district departments, not schools, also have contributed by cutting their supply budgets… These shared sacrifices, while difficult, are necessary to ensure financial stability and avoid even deeper cuts in the future.”

Patton added that music programs “are now at every school. We had no recent music program at Hawthorne Middle/High School; we are proud to announce Hawthorne will be bringing back their music program… All elementary schools will now be retaining their media aides.”

Public comment

During the public comment period, three parents and teachers from Rawlings Elementary expressed concerns about the board’s recent vote to end the year-round calendar before the first year was complete. Teachers complained that they had no input into the process and that teachers who had been counting on paychecks in June and July due to the summer start date for classes would now miss two paychecks.

Stefie Pishock, the Shell Elementary music teacher who spoke out at the April 15 school board meeting about having her job cut to half-time, said she was grateful that her position had been restored, along with those of the PE and art teachers and a media aide. She was also grateful that the band program will be restored at Hawthorne Middle/High School, which she said had been her biggest dream since she started at Shell three years ago.

Fourteen teachers and parents criticized the emergency cancellation of the charter for Constellation Charter School in Waldo. They spoke of the difficulty in finding a school for their children on short notice, and teachers said that those on 12-month pay plans would not be paid for time they had already worked. Several speakers said the board had listened to a few disgruntled people and had not adequately investigated the allegations.

After public comment, Delaney said, “The School Board of Alachua County’s district safety team was in regular contact with the leadership at Constellation Charter and bringing up these safety concerns for months prior to the board’s decision to close the school, and despite those efforts, there continued to be unresolved safety issues that were multiplying at the end of the school’s tenure. Secondly, Florida law was not being followed regarding required safety measures and personnel that had to be employed or in place by Constellation Charter. On Apil 25, the School Board of Alachua County staff members were summoned to attend a meeting convened by state-level Florida Department of Education safety officials who expressed serious concern over the failure of Constellation Charter to follow Florida law regarding these safety issues. The situation continued to deteriorate last week… with the resignation of certain personnel who were required to be present and serving the school, and their failure, caused by those resignations, presented additional violations of Florida law that had to be addressed on short notice.”

Reductions in public comment

During a discussion on updating district policies, Member Thomas Vu objected to a significant change to the public comment policy.

Currently, members of the public can speak for three minutes near the beginning of the meeting on any topic; if more than 20 people sign up to speak, that is reduced to two minutes. During the meeting, members of the public can speak to each agenda item, and there is a second general public comment period at the end of the meeting.

Under the proposed rules, there would be one public comment period at the beginning of the meeting for a maximum of 45 minutes, and each member of the public would get two minutes to speak on all the agenda items. No public comment would be taken during discussion of the individual agenda items, and a second public comment period at the end will give members of the public two minutes to speak on topics not on the agenda. 

After Chair Sarah Rockwell asked board members to wait until the second reading to pull out specific policies for an individual vote, Member Tina Certain made a motion to approve all the policies on first reading and advertise a public hearing, and the motion was seconded by Member Leanetta McNealy. The motion passed unanimously.

The public hearing will be held on June 3, and the second reading will be on July 31.

Raises for administrators

The next agenda item was approval of a 1.3% raise for school-based and district-based administrators. Certain made a motion to approve the raise, and McNealy seconded the motion.

Vu said the district is asking employees to make sacrifices, and although he would have preferred to give the raise to school-based administrators and not district-based administrators, he did not have that option under the current structure, so “I am now left with two options. I take this pay raise as is, 1.3% for retro for everyone, or no one gets it at the administrative level. And if I had to make that choice and I’m asking someone to make an additional sacrifice, it would be our administrators. They are the most highly paid folks in this district… So I will be voting against this.”

Rockwell said she felt “empathy for our Assistant Principals… Because they are getting a double hit, moving to 11 months, they’re already making a sacrifice, but with no way to separate them out,” she said she would be voting against the motion. She pointed out again that the school district has to cut $20 million from its General Fund budget next year, close to 10% of that budget.

Rockwell continued, “So we are in a position of having to make really, really hard decisions that, quite frankly, have been put off in the past. We’ve known, for far longer than I’ve been on the board, that the purse strings were getting tighter and budgets were getting smaller, and nobody wants to be the one who makes the hard votes. Nobody wants to. I don’t want to. None of us want to, but I’m willing to do it, even if it’s unpopular, because I did not run for School Board to be a career politician. If I don’t get reelected because of some of these decisions, so be it.”

Member Janine Plavac pointed out again that Assistant Principals’ schedules are being cut to 11-month schedules, “so they’re taking a cut… Let’s be real: 1.3% is not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things.” She said she thought the administrators should get the same raise the teachers received, which was 1.3%. Board Attorney Delaney confirmed that it is rare for admistrators to not get the same raise as teachers.

Patton said that district staff positions would be cut – “not being reduced by one month, not being reduced by one hour; they are being completely eliminated” – by $4 million, and school positions are being cut by $8 million, “but a disproportionate number of employees are mostly at schools, not districts. So the district is taking an enormous hit.” She also said the Assistant Principals just increased from 11 months to 12 months in the past three years, “when we went on this spree of spending.”

Certain said she would be willing to change the motion to get rid of the retroactive pay, “but I don’t think it is right for us to delay and not give any pay raise at all until next year.”

McNealy said she wanted the administrators to have the raises with retroactive pay, and Plavac agreed. 

Patton pointed out that Principals and Assistant Principals “start their day at some ungodly hour in the morning” and then attend sporting events in the evening, sometimes staying at the school until midnight – or later if they go to an away game. She said, “I think it’s a hard message… for just the sheer hours that they put in… Again, it’s not much of a raise.”

The motion to give 1.3% raises to administrators, retroactive to July 2024, passed 3-2, with Vu and Rockwell in dissent.

Staffing Allocations Manual

The next agenda item was approval of the revised Staffing Allocations Manual, which can be found at this link. 

Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Deborah Terry said the changes include specifying the number of hours for every position and listing the number of work days per year for each position. She said there had been questions about a section that crossed out all the positions funded by the One Mill tax and said that was because the document was “just about allocations at schools and at district,” not about funding. 

Certain made a motion to approve the manual, and Plavac seconded the motion. 

During public comment, speakers expressed concern about cuts to media aides, database clerks, and Assistant Principals. ACEA President Carmen Ward reiterated that the union believes the changes to hours are changes to working conditions and thus illegal. 

Ward also brought up a statement in the document that district staffing allocations would be “controlled through the budgeting process” and said she was concerned that those were not specified. Patton said she had already stated that she would be making $4 million in cuts in district positions through the budget process.

Certain pointed out that in 2021-22, the district increased hours in many of the positions that are now being cut; those increases came out of ESSER funds, and “they weren’t intended to be permanent changes… I don’t understand how we’re going to get to… [a] $20 million reduction in funding [if we don’t start to reduce and do some things like this now].”

Vu said, “We are again about to ask a bunch of folks who can least afford to lose it to make sacrifices while we just gave [1.3% raises] to the folks that in this district need it the least. I have a big problem with that.”

Rockwell said, “There’s no way to make these kinds of cuts without cutting positions or hours or a combination of both.” She asked Patton to provide a list for the public of district positions that are being cut and their salary and benefits. 

Plavac said she had really pushed to keep media aides in elementary schools but supported the cuts because of the threat that the State could take over the district if reserves drop too low. She concluded, “So I want to thank all the teachers and everybody that works here, but I think we have to do this. I don’t see any way around it.”

Vu pointed out that the cuts at the district office would mean the remaining employees would need to work more. 

The staffing manual was approved 4-1, with Vu in dissent.

Citizens Field

The final agenda item was a discussion about providing a letter of intent to the City of Gainesville that would support conveying the property to the School Board to renovate or build a stadium. 

Certain made a motion to approve a letter of intent to submit to the City of Gainesville for the conveyance of the Citizens Field property to the district to allow its redevelopment by the district. McNealy seconded the motion. 

McNealy said she supported the motion and supported designating capital funds (separate from the General Fund that pays salaries) for “establishing a solid, gorgeous, wonderful stadium, but also including many other things that are needed out there.”

Rockwell addressed some discussions in the community, saying GHS has no property for a stadium and Buchholz “barely” has space, plus it has “some pretty serious watershed and environmental issues.” She said it is typical for schools to share stadiums in other districts and added, “The reality is, our students need somewhere to play… [Sports] support our academics, and the fiscally responsible decision… is to move forward in partnership with the City.”

The motion passed unanimously.