Take action now! You can help settle our contract!
Help friends in your school community learn more by sharing our Web site with them, kentschools.org
Call school board president Jim Berrios and ask him to support quality schools, not misguided administrators
Send email to Supt. Vargas and each school board member, reminding them to invest in our children's future
Host a meeting in your home or neighborhood.
Put a sign in the window of your home, car, or business that says "I support a fair settlement for teachers and a quality education for children" (available upon request).
Write a letter to the editor calling for a fair contract settlement.
In tough economic times, Kent is in a strange, but fortunate, position. The district expects to end the year with approximately $21 million in the bank -- even though administrators have laid off classroom teachers and publicly threatened to roll back teacher pay.
Budgets are about priorities. Our top priority should be providing a great education for our students. That means we have to be able to hire and keep great teachers.
Kent is losing top veterans to neighboring districts that pay as much as $10,000 more, and treat teachers with greater professional respect. Students benefit from smaller classes and 1-on-1 attention. That means granting professional educators the time to do what they know works best with their students. It means offering competitive pay and benefits. And it means recognizing that educators’ duties never end just because the bell has rung, so the district must acknowledge that workload has become a critical issue.
Can Kent afford this investment? The district’s own budget data says yes. Kent is the fourth-largest school district in the state. Only Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma are larger. And yet the Kent School District ranks dead last among Puget Sound area school districts in teacher compensation. Nearby districts prove more can be done. Kent spends 68 percent of its budget on teaching and teaching support. Neighboring districts spend up to 73 percent. Lake Washington employs a teacher for every 16 students; Kent has only one teacher for every 19 students.
In 2007-08, the last complete budget year, the district spent $556 less per pupil for teaching and teaching support than the average district their size. But the district exceeded the average cost, by $25 per student, for building-level administration. Kent has more administrators per teacher than it has teachers per student. In the past five years, the number of full time certificated instructional staff has grown 4.7 percent, while certificated administrative staffing has trippled that growth, for a whopping 15.0 percent increase.
The Kent School Board has lost sight of our community’s priorities. Our community wants a great education for our children -- in good times and bad. Contrary to the district’s assertions, educators realize the current state of the economy, and, as they always do, teachers have stepped up to help save taxpayers millions of dollars. While our members always bargain their contract within the context of the prevailing economy, we also know that the Kent School Board was not entirely honest with the community when it suggested, at the start of bargaining, that widespread layoffs and salary rollbacks were necessary.
Kent educators have already made significant compromises at the bargaining table to reflect the current economic times. Teachers have:
* Withdrawn our proposal that the district pay a 4.3 percent COLA approved by taxpayers under Initiative 732.
* Reduced $4 million from our initial proposal for supplemental pay to offset teachers’ responsibilities that extend beyond the students’ school day.
* Reduced our request for smaller class sizes; instead we are essentially asking the district to commit to ensuring overcrowded classes don’t grow even larger. The district has refused.
* Withdrawn proposals for various compensation increases when reassigned, transferred and engaged in quality-improvement programs such as National Board certification.
In tough economic times, 
The Kent School Board has lost sight of our community’s priorities. Our community wants a great education for our children -- in good times and bad. Contrary to the district’s assertions, educators realize the current state of the economy, and, as they always do, teachers have stepped up to help save taxpayers millions of dollars. While our members always bargain their contract within the context of the prevailing economy, we also know that the Kent School Board was not entirely honest with the community when it suggested, at the start of bargaining, that widespread layoffs and salary rollbacks were necessary.