New America School teachers say unionization defeat a blow to students, too

AURORA | What could have been the first charter school union in the state of Colorado was defeated last month when the New America School Board of Education decided not to recognize a union spearheaded by a group of its teachers.

At its April 20 meeting, the board of education instead voted to establish what it called collaborative committees at each school, which it said would help draw feedback from a larger pool of people. Union advocates saw it as a clear attempt to sideline the union.

New America Schools is a public charter school network with campuses in Aurora, Thornton and Lakewood. It was founded in 2004 in part by Gov. Jared Polis and is designed to serve nontraditional students ages 14-21, particularly recent immigrants.

The union effort began in 2021, and was driven by a desire for educators to have a seat at the table. Current and former NAS teachers who spoke to The Sentinel said the school has struggled with significant teacher turnover, stressful working conditions and low pay.

The school has also declined significantly in enrollment, from a peak of about 1,200 five years ago to around 500 currently. Superintendent Dan McMinimee said that this has been fueled by the same factors that are causing declining enrollment in some Aurora Public Schools schools, including cost of living increases that are driving low-income families out of the metro area, as well as effects of the pandemic.

Before coming to NAS, McMinimee was the superintendent of JeffCo Public Schools, where he made a base salary of $220,000, according to past reporting from Chalkbeat. He told the Colorado Sun he took a pay cut of 20% last school year and is making $166,000 this school year. He declined to confirm those numbers to The Sentinel.

McMinimee said the amount of work a superintendent does doesn’t necessarily decrease if the student body is smaller, and that he is being paid fairly for his level of experience in the educational sector. Some teachers who spoke to The Sentinel questioned why he receives such a large salary when they are being paid less than what teachers at local public schools receive.

McMinimee said an outside provider is currently conducting a compensation study to see how NAS’ salaries compare to other schools in the area and other charter schools.

Jamie Paterson, who taught at the NAS campus in Aurora before resigning in March, said that she was paid $38,000, about 14% less than a teacher in the JeffCo school district.

She said the pay was the “final straw” for her ultimately deciding to quit, and that it wasn’t enough to cover her bills.

During her time at NAS she said there were ongoing issues with a lack of support and leadership from the administration, and that she was at one point assigned to teach classes in subjects she knew nothing about.

For a long stretch of time the Aurora campus did not have wifi, which she said made it hard for teachers to teach and students to complete their assignments (that problem has now been fixed). She also said there was significant teacher turnover at the school and that for a long time the school didn’t have any support staff, such as a nurse or counselor.

Due to these issues, Paterson said that truancy was a significant problem and students would regularly not show up to class.

“I don’t really blame them, it must feel really depressing to come to a school where you don’t have adequate resources,” she said.

Jared Ress, a former NAS teacher who taught science and math for three years at the Lakewood campus, said that he saw a teacher get fired every year at his campus.

“I also saw at least one teacher quit in frustration and then I was one of the ones who quit in frustration,” he said.

Ress said there was an “adversarial culture” between teachers and the administration, with teachers feeling disrespected and undervalued.

Teachers were hired on a year-to-year basis with no ongoing contracts, he said, and it was stressful to work in an environment with no long-term job stability.

“Half of the faculty turns over every single school year, which is unheard of in a school that is ostensibly prioritizing building relationships,” he said.

According to the Colorado Education Association, 50% of NAS teachers have turned over in the last six months.

Stephanie Ernst, who teaches math at the Aurora campus, said that teachers want a union so they can have a say in the district’s financial decisions and advocate for students.

“We think that having a voice at the table will really help keep students’ daily needs at the forefront,” she said.

In Colorado, some public sector employees have collective bargaining rights but not K-12 school employees. A bill going through the state legislature would expand those protections to about 40,000 public employees if passed but does not include K-12 and higher education employees, despite initial lobbying attempts by the CEA and other organizations to include them.

The union had been lobbying for recognition since the fall, and the board originally told them that it would take a vote at its March meeting. At that meeting it announced it would be postponing the decision until April, where it chose to pursue the collaborative committee model instead.

Each school will have its own collaborative committee, which will consist of teacher, staff, student and parent representatives who will meet with the board four times a year. The committees will be able to make recommendations to the board or the superintendent, but will not have decision making power. A final draft of the policy to create the committees will be presented to the board at its upcoming May meeting, with implementation scheduled for the upcoming school year.

McMinimee said that the committees will allow the school to get feedback from a broader range of the community, whereas the union would only represent teachers. He also said that the teachers lobbying for a union did not represent the entirety of the faculty and that the drive had caused division at the schools.

“This decision allows our entire school community to participate in making the schools the best that they can be,” he said.

At the board meeting, several members questioned whether the union was representative of the faculty as a whole based on the number of people who had publicly voiced support for it. They also said it would be difficult to have one union for three different campuses that have separate needs.

The union effort was supported by the Colorado Education Association, which lambasted NAS for declining to recognize it.

“Hardworking New America Schools educators deserved to have their union recognized and the school board was wrong to vote it down. All workers, including teachers, should have the right to come together and form a union so their voices are heard,” CEA president Amie Baca-Oehlert said in a news release.

Ernst said that the majority of the teachers supported the union but were afraid to speak because those who did were being retaliated against. McMinimee told The Sentinel that allegations of retaliation were “baseless.”

“The only people who do show up are the ones willing to stick their necks out,” Ernst said.

Ernst said that after being vocally supportive of the union she had been told by an administrator that the school could not guarantee that she would be invited back for the next school year.

“I was told ‘well, we’ll have to check the budget to see if there’s enough money for your position.’ I’m the only math teacher,” Ernst said. “What are they going to do, have a high school with no math teacher?”

She believes in the mission of the school but worries that the high teacher turnover and lack of support from administration is ultimately hurting the student body.

“The students deserve to have this school but does this school deserve its students anymore?” she asked.