Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

December 7, 2011 – A date which will live in inform-y.

Broward Teachers Union president Pat Santeramo resigned late yesterday, reportedly walking off with $255,020 in accrued sick leave and vacation pay. AFT Administrator John Tarka immediately canceled the expulsion hearing that was scheduled for today, which was expected to draw about 200 interested BTU members.

“He wanted there to be more harmony than disharmony,” said Santeramo’s attorney, Mike Moskowitz. “All these rounds of hearings and disagreements, they would have diverted from the work of the union.”

Of course, harmony is what put the union in a $3.8 million hole and quietly condoned the reimbursement out of dues money the political contribtutions made by BTU officers and family. A little disharmony might have at least triggered a pause.

AFT and BTU were dreading the hearing, and might have been sent over the edge by the realization - voiced online by Sun-Sentinel reporter Cara Fitzpatrick – that “you can bet the union will have a hard time policing that many people’s cell phones and video cameras.”

Rather than have members actually hear testimony about what has been going on at BTU headquarters, discretion was the better part of valor and dues money took care of the rest. Santeramo’s resignation doesn’t even take effect until the end of the month. This appears to be standard AFT administratorship practice. Few people remember that disgraced United Teachers of Dade president Pat Tornillo continued to draw his salary weeks after the FBI raid of union headquarters, and long after the whistleblower was suspended without pay. What’s more, most of Santeramo’s 2011-12 salary was paid up front, so that money is already gone.

To sum up, the new devotion to transparency resulted in a resignation deal negotiated behind closed doors without member input, a vow of no additional comment, a canceled hearing, some sort of payout, and an unexplained three-week extension of Santeramo’s tenure. The sound you hear is the AFT lid being slammed on the whole situation.

What opposition research firm is trying to drum up business with teachers’ unions by suggesting they scrutinize charter school petitioners?

Click here to read:

1) Local Control: The California Teachers Association Way

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quote of the Week

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has produced a short report titled, “Are Charter School Unions Worth the Bargain?” that contains some longed-for hard data on charter school unionization rates, where those schools are located, and why they are unionized – whether by law or by teacher action.

The report, authored by Mitch Price, also evaluates charter school collective bargaining agreements and concludes that while they tend to be more flexible than traditional district contracts, they also contain many of the same trappings. But in my mind the greatest value of the study is not in its analysis of contract quality, but in its series of graphs and tables with basic data about unionized charters.

This simple one, for example, has the number of unionized charters and the method by which they achieved it – using statistics provided by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools:

Price adds that 44% of conversion charters are unionized, but only 9% of start-ups.

Charter schools that unionize through employee vote are a rarity, which might explain why such occurrences always get media play. Worrying about this becoming a trend or a movement is a waste of time and emotion. Just from a practical standpoint, unions will not spend money and manpower to organize a handful of teachers at a single charter school. If they have designs on increasing membership through charter employees, it’s much more likely to happen through a state mandate.

Over at Dropout Nation, RiShawn Biddle has two posts on NEA’s contributions to advocacy organizations and academics from its Labor Department disclosure report – possibly saving me the trouble of doing it myself.

The first is here, and the second is here.

RiShawn adds important background information about the recipients of NEA’s largesse, but, as always, be aware of the nuances when reading the executive salary data. Different categorizations yield different results, blurring the picture.

You can read it in its entirety here, but I’ll list a few items that haven’t been highlighted before:

* AFT involvement was triggered by a letter from Florida Education Association president Andy Ford.

* The Broward Teachers Union overestimated dues revenue by $1.2 million this year. BTU counted on 13,725 full-time equivalent members, but had only 11,654.

* “The record keeping at BTU is poor, so it is possible that the officers did not realize they were being overpaid.”

* “We believed Mr. Santeramo had accumulated 230 vacation days and 122 sick leave days as of June 30, 2011 – an accrued amount as of June 30, 2011 of $255,020.81. This represents 35 percent of the total accrued vacation/sick benefits for the BTU.”

* For the union’s multiple PACs, the audit found only $96,652 out of $265,620 in expenditures had any supporting documentation. Contributions were approved by Santeramo alone, instead of by the PAC board and the BTU executive council, as is required.

AFT’s recommendations include basic financial practices that should have been used all along. The auditors also noted, “In the time allotted, we have not been able to review every transaction or financial matter related to the BTU.” That leaves the possibility of other problems waiting to be uncovered. We’ll see how it all pans out.