Buffalo Schools' teachers have delivered a resounding "no" to the district's proposal to move to three bell times instead of two at the start and end of the school day.
The Buffalo Teachers Federation on Friday afternoon shared the results of a survey distributed to members between Oct. 14-20. Of 2,164 responses, 1,823 – or 84.24% – said they did not support signing the memorandum of understanding, while 273 (or 12.62%) said they were in favor and 68 (or 3.14%) abstained.
"The serious issues with the District MOU, provided by Nathaniel Kuzma, BPS General Counsel, in addition to being problematic, raise questions of integrity and trust as is reflected by the overwhelming rejection of the MOU," wrote BTF president Phil Rumore in a memo to the Buffalo Board of Education and Superintendent Tonja M. Williams. Kuzma was not immediately available for comment Friday afternoon.
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The district's aim is to adjust school start times, primarily for K-8 schools, to allow bus drivers enough time to complete two routes in the morning as opposed to the conventional one.
The district on Sept. 8 proposed moving start times from 8 and 9 a.m. to 7:30, 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. as a strategy to address the nationwide bus driver shortage plaguing Buffalo Public Schools. The logic was bus drivers bringing kids to school for the 7:30 a.m. start would then be able to complete another route in time for the 9:30 a.m. start, Kuzma explained in early September, essentially adding more routes without requiring more drivers.
The length of the school day would not change for teachers or students under the district's proposal, and no school's start or end times would change by more than a half hour.
Rumore cited in Friday's memo several reasons why teachers were not in favor, noting teachers who are also parents might have to adjust child care, or might suddenly face a difficult situation if they had multiple kids attending schools that started at different times.
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The president pointed to how the MOU clashed with the district's proposals in ongoing contract negotiations and the collective bargaining agreement from 2016. Rumore said the existing contract allows teachers at affected schools to be placed at the top of the transfer list by seniority, but the MOU said affected teachers would be able to apply for and likely receive a hardship transfer.
"This forces a teacher to leave the students they have been teaching and creates problems if there are no vacancies, if they have no alternative but to seek an unwanted transfer to another school," Rumore wrote.
One reason why the district could not make the change without teacher input was that moving start times to 7:30 a.m. would violate the existing agreement where teachers would not be required to work before 7:50 a.m. nor after 4:05 p.m. The district's MOU would move the latest end time to 4:45 p.m.
Ben Tsujimoto can be reached at btsujimoto@buffnews.com, at (716) 849-6927 or on Twitter at @Tsuj10.
