A Higley Unified School District board member has continued her objections to the district’s teachers association.
Vice President Anna Van Hoek said she does not believe the Higley Education Association should be allowed to speak for all the staff and should not have a memorandum of understanding with the district, as a result.
Van Hoek’s complaints echoed those she brought up last year at the adoption of the MOU, but once again the governing board approved it with Van Hoek as the lone dissenting vote.
“(Non-member teachers) don't feel represented, not necessarily,” Van Hoek said. “I'm not talking about my feelings about the situation. It's when teachers see certain individuals and who they support and how they behave, it makes them feel unsupported.
“So when we have HEA members negotiating things on behalf of let's say 85% that are not members, but those numbers aren't members for a reason.”
Among what Van Hoek said was her objections is how pay-for-performance is done with teachers who are being disciplined, that its recommendations for salaries are unsustainable and that HEA was partly responsible for keeping kids out of school and masked.
Van Hoek said she had asked for a breakdown of how many district teachers are members of HEA and how many are not but had not received it. President Michelle Anderson asked for that to be provided to the board.
However, Board Member Amanda Wade said teachers receive benefits from HEA even if they are not association members. She used the example of a non-member teacher being able to get legal representation from HEA in an employment matter.
“Every site has an HEA rep, sometimes multiple depending on the site,” Wade said. “And often one of the things that they do is they create avenues and opportunities for us, the teachers who are non-members and teachers who are members, to be able to discuss and express things that we have issues with or concerns.”
Wade said the HEA supports all staff through matters like negotiating for salaries or blackout calendars.
In response to Van Hoek’s assertion that the salary proposals are not sustainable and that if an override does not pass, there will have to be cuts, Board Member Kristina Reese said HEA does not make the recommendations. It is the Meet and Confer group which discusses these topics, and that group includes a variety of people.
Reese said if an override does not pass, there will be many conversations if cuts must happen and that involving multiple people in the conversations helps make better decisions
We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on X.
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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