Sabrina

Last night I attended a birthday party at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse on Van Ness. One of the members of our party teaches at Bessie Carmichael . She ended up talking with one of our waitresses named Sabrina. It turned out that Sabrina is a teacher at Sherman Elementary. I knew that many teachers in San Francisco have to take part-time jobs in order to afford to live in San Francisco. I even wrote an op-ed about it with USEF President Dennis Kelly but I never really encountered it.

I talked with Sabrina a bit and she confirmed that she indeed could not live in San Francisco off her paycheck from SFUSD and even if UESF is successful in getting a 12% raise for her and her colleagues, she would still need to hold a part time job. So I asked her what she fealt she would need to make as a teacher in order to not take a part time job. Her answer was $50,000 a year. That's a little less than a 25% raise. For the rest of the dinner I thought about how it could be possible to give teachers that kind of raise. I quicky saddened as I realized its not possible at least not any time soon. There's a parcel tax coming up on the ballot and I'm all for it but I'm sure even that cannot balance SFUSD's budget at give teachers a 25% raise.

What can we do that will enable us, the residents of San Francisco, to pay our teachers a wage that will allow them to focus on teaching our children? In order to accomplish this we need an extra $85 million every year, probably more actually since other Unions will want bigger raises as well. There's only two years until SEUI 790 comes back to the bargaining table. Just for the $85 million, that parcel tax would have to impose a duty of $107 on each and every resident of San Francisco.