An arbitrator has ruled in favor of St. Paul Public Schools in a dispute over whether teaching assistants should have received premium pay for working the district’s child care program last summer.
When Gov. Tim Walz ordered public schools to close because of the pandemic in March 2020, he instructed schools to provide no-cost child care during regular school hours for students under 13 whose parents were essential workers.
In response, the St. Paul district created a program they called Essential Kids Care, which went beyond the governor’s mandate to offer free care from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
At the same time, the district stopped offering Discovery Club, its longtime fee-based child care program.
To help staff Essential Kids Care, the district reached a memorandum of agreement with the Teamsters Local 320 to pay an extra $3 per hour to teaching assistants providing the care.
The district paid that premium for the rest of the school year and again in the fall. But during the summer, when the fee-based Discovery Club was running again and open to all children, the district paid employees their standard rate.
UNION ARGUES SUMMER PROGRAM WAS CONTINUATION OF SCHOOL-YEAR PROGRAM
The union filed a grievance on June 15, 2020, arguing the summer program was a continuation of the school-year program and that premium pay was in order.
The matter went to arbitration in May, and arbitrator Christine Ver Ploeg this month sided with the school district.
“The two programs are entirely different from all perspectives,” she wrote, citing the fee component and the different child populations they served.
Further, the district was not obligated to offer any childcare during the summer. And where Essential Kids Care had an educational component, Discovery Club was recreational.
“The Governor’s mandate addressed a unique emergency situation; not a parent’s normal summertime dilemma,” Ver Ploeg wrote.
The district also gave employees fair notice that they would not get premium pay during the summer, the arbitrator wrote. A Discovery Club supervisor emailed Essential Kids Care staff on May 22 to say that premium pay would end when the school year did.
“The Union cannot claim that its members were misled when they volunteered to participate in last summer’s Discovery Club program,” Ver Ploeg wrote.
YEAR-ROUND SCHOOL
The district also prevailed in a separate arbitration ruling concerning Crossroads Montessori, a year-round elementary school that takes 15-day breaks between 45-day sessions of instruction.
When Walz ordered schools closed in March 2020 so that teachers could prepare for distance learning, most of the St. Paul district was on spring break. Crossroads, however, was not, so the school board changed its calendar to add back five days of instruction during the May intersession.
The school usually offers programming during intersessions but opted not to during the May break, leaving its teaching assistants unexpectedly short on work hours.
The workers sought to take paid quarantine leave during the May intercession, but the district refused.
Arbitrator James Laumeyer ruled that the teaching assistants were not guaranteed those work hours and that the scheduling change did not trigger the quarantine leave provision in their contract.