Let's Hear it for the Non-Teacher "Teachers!"

Just to remind everyone that it's not just classroom teachers who are in this fight, we would like to post this fabulous letter submitted by our psychologists:


As student support providers (School Psychologists) for YCJUSD we wanted to publicly voice our support for our union’s stance in the current negotiation crisis. We believe that YCJUSD teachers, counselors, psychologists and speech therapists deserve fair compensation for the service they provide to the communities of Yucaipa and Calimesa. We firmly believe that a high quality and well rounded educational system is vital to both communities. However, for Yucaipa and Calimesa to have a high quality educational system it needs to recruit highly qualified and highly motivated certificated staff. This is not to say that Yucaipa-Calimesa is not already a high quality educational system but rather we believe in order to maintain its level of excellence Yucaipa-Calimesa certificated staff should be reasonably compensated. This would also create a competitive salary schedule to further recruit and maintain quality staff. After reviewing all of the facts, it seems reasonable to us that the request of being compensated the full COLA amount for salaries is a reasonable and realistic demand. We as student support providers deal with some of the neediest students in the communities of Calimesa and Yucaipa. These students bring many different issues to the classroom, from behavior disorders, to learning disorders, to cognitive disabilities, to autism and other disabilities. Yearly, teachers are asked to get students to meet higher and higher levels of academic standards and achievement goals despite the increasing needs that students bring to the classroom, thus placing increasing demands on teachers. These demands should not be the primary responsibility of the classroom teacher, rather should be the responsibility of a strong network of highly qualified student support providers, who are experts in the field of counseling, mental health and educational psychology. Along with fair and competitive compensation for teachers, YCJUSD student support providers should also be fairly and duly compensated. Failure to competitively and fairly compensate all YCJUSD certificate staff will put the communities of Yucaipa and Calimesa in a less competitive position to recruit high quality teachers and student support staff. Without high quality teachers students receive a less quality education. Without high quality student support staff students with behavior, emotional, learning, cognitive and other disabilities receive less quality support. Less quality education leads to more illiteracy and less quality student support leads to crime and other societal problems. Board members, community leaders and business leaders should then contemplate which is worse: paying YCJUSD certificated staff the full amount of Cost Of Living Adjustment or possibly having more illiteracy and delinquency in their communities.

YCJUSD School Psychologists


NOTE: We also include our counselors and our speech therapists!

624 Days Without a Settlement!