Several District officials and school activists say they fear the D.C. school system is about to embark on another chaotic budget season by putting together a spending plan without having reached contract agreements with its employee unions.
Superintendent Clifford B. Janey, who will submit a budget for fiscal year 2006 to the school board next month, is still negotiating three-year labor agreements with the unions representing teachers, principals, bus drivers and teacher's aides. The unions' last contracts with the school system expired in September 2004.
School officials last week declined to say whether any money for employee pay raises would be included in Janey's budget proposal, explaining that they could not comment on any matters related to ongoing collective bargaining. But in the past, they have avoided budgeting for raises during contract talks, saying that doing so would reduce their leverage in the negotiations.
Education advocates say they are worried that the scenario of the last two budget cycles is about to be repeated. In each of those instances, the superintendent and school board did not budget the full cost of employee raises and the mayor and D.C. Council -- to prevent the withholding of the raises or other drastic cuts -- agreed to a last-minute bailout of the school system.
"You can't just sit on the whole thing and hope in the end that the unions will cave or the mayor will come up with more money," said Mary Levy, who is director of the Public Education Reform Project for the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and has studied the school system's financial structure.
Levy said school leaders should either complete labor negotiations before the start of the budget process, so they would know exactly how much money to budget for raises, or factor collective bargaining agreements into the school funding formula.
"This is a fixable problem," she said.
Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who chairs the council's education committee, said there would be "strong resistance" among her colleagues to provide emergency funding again. "The school system should negotiate a contract it can afford, not go out of its budget," she added.
Patterson and others also said the school system is violating a law passed by the council in 2002 that requires agencies to complete collective bargaining with public employee unions before submitting a budget.
She said many city government agencies are in compliance with the law, reaching agreements with unions before the budget season and, in some cases, even before the old labor pact has expired. But she said the school system has regularly broken the law, which is not enforced.
"The school system never got itself into the same cycle" as city government, Patterson said. "They didn't have strong people in labor relations."
Rudolph F. Pierce, a lawyer who is acting as the school system's chief negotiator, declined comment on Patterson's allegation that the law is being violated. Pierce did say that tight resources are a factor in the slow pace of negotiations with the various employee unions.
