November 3, 2025

Dear faculty colleagues,

The District all-employee communication last Friday (10/31/25) contained disinformation that again demonstrated the District’s unwillingness to show they value faculty in a material way, beyond lip service. Their monthly update included a press release that claimed that “AFT’s latest three-year proposal at 54% would cost over $54 million for the faculty group alone, roughly five times the available ongoing resources the District will have for raises and increased benefit costs across all employee groups.”

What does this mean?

The District does not know how to compute the cost of our economic proposals accurately. For example, the District wrongly imputed one-time increases into all three years of the contract on multiple proposals we have made, thus tripling their estimated cost. Further, in their calculations, the District used our initial proposal for FT medical benefits, in which we asked for 100% coverage of all healthcare plans for single, 2-party and family levels for FT faculty. However, in our most recent proposal, we asked the District to raise the contribution of the 2-party and family plans from 88% of the Kaiser cost to 92%. The District’s costing of our economic proposals completely ignores the significant movement AFT made in an effort to reach an agreement.

Why did the District send this information to us now? It means they are seriously feeling threatened by our consecutive actions in 10/8 Flex Boycott and 10/29 informational picketing. It is a classic strategy by a school District facing impasse to advertise an overbloated cost to dissuade the teachers from standing strong by their legitimate demands.

Today, AFT filed a response to the District’s request for impasse declaration.  From here on, we need to build our strike-readiness as we go through the impasse process. Come join our AFT membership meeting to learn about impasse and strike on 11/12 at 2:30-4:30pm, at Canada College in room 3-117 or by zoom.

Finally, we received a great volume of member emails in response to Chet’s email and video over the weekend, which we appreciate very much.  We are very busy responding to the District’s actions and organizing for strike-readiness so we haven’t had a chance to respond to many of your emails, but we sincerely value your engagement and will try to respond when we get time this week!

In Solidarity,

Rika
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Rika Yonemura-Fabian
President, AFT 1493
fabian@aft1493.org