Advocacy

SEAC partners with Capitol Advisors to provide a powerful voice for member districts in Sacramento. Ongoing actions include responses to legislative issues raised by member districts, regular legislator contacts, an annual Lobby Day for the SEAC Board, and target legislation advocacy each year. SEAC member districts are kept informed on current and pending laws.

SEAC is an active member in the orange County Labor Employment Relations Association (OCLERA), a joint labor-management chapter of the National LERA. This association provides programs and training to joint labor-management groups to promote positive, effective labor relations in both the public and private sectors, and addresses legislative issues relation to labor relations.

SEAC Legislative Platform

Legislative Priorities

The legislative priorities of the School Employers Association of California (SEAC) are intended to provide direction to the SEAC board as it takes actions on proposed legislation and to Capitol Advisors Group as they represent our interests as policy advocates.

Guiding Principals

SEAC represents the interests of school districts regarding labor relations, collective bargaining, and employer-employee rights. Our legislative positions must always reflect our core values:

  • Placing student interests first in bargaining;
  • Advocating and protecting management rights to lead and operate effective school districts;
  • Assisting districts to build and protect fiscal integrity;
  • Assisting districts to provide fair and competitive salaries, benefits, and working conditions for their employees.

State Legislative Priorities

Teacher Shortage

  • SEAC supports aggressive legislative and budget efforts to create innovative programs and incentives to build upon and further the efforts made in the 2017–18 Budget Act to recruit teachers into “high need” subject areas such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), bilingual education, and special education.

Pensions & Retirement

  • SEAC supports efforts to mitigate the escalation and volatility of employer contribution rates for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and California State Teachers’ Retirement System, both of which place significant fixed cost pressures on local educational agencies across the state.
  • SEAC supports efforts to protect the retirement benefits of our employees, past and present, by addressing CalPERS’ and CalSTRS’ unfunded obligations.
  • SEAC believes that sustainability and integrity of the CalPERS and CalSTRS pension funds must be prioritized over investment mandates—especially divestiture—that are inconsistent with the pension systems’ efforts to maximize risk-adjusted investment returns, control employer and employee contribution rates, and provide the retirement benefits promised to their members.

Teacher Evaluation

  • SEAC supports legislation and efforts to reform the teacher evaluation laws found in the Education Code in order to better reflect the multiple-measure models of accountability that serve to inform management decision-making regarding retention, reward, and improvement where needed. Any system must serve the underlying purposes of personnel decisions of tenure, promotion, and dismissal.
  • California’s teacher evaluation system should follow a model established by the state, but with flexibility for school districts to use it or create their own, so long as the locally created system meets all factors established in the state model.

Charter Schools

  • SEAC supports legislation requiring charter schools to be subject to the same disclosure, transparency, and good government governance laws that apply to traditional public schools, including open meetings, conflicts of interest, and the Political Reform Act, among others.

School District Budget Reserve Cap

  • SEAC supports repealing the local school district budget reserve cap established in the Budget Act of 2014–15.

Paid Family Leave

  • SEAC supports efforts to provide state–funded paid family leave so long as it does not expand the scope of local bargaining. This should be a state-supported policy and should not vary from district to district.

Local Control

  • SEAC believes that, with the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, policymakers should not add further restrictions and mandates upon school districts without adequately compensating districts.

School Facilities

  • SEAC believes the state has a fundamental role in partnering with school districts to build, modernize, and provide emergency repair for school housing.
  • SEAC supports the speedy processing, issuance, and apportionment of Proposition 51 (2016) school bonds.

Teacher Tenure

  • SEAC supports an increase in the teacher probationary period, from two years to at least three years, without cause and without other erosion to management rights, in order to provide sufficient opportunity to assess and support beginning teacher performance.

Approved by SEAC Board of Directors