The California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) has issued a formal complaint against the Healdsburg Unified School District based on an unfair labor practice charge that was filed by local teachers on May 15, 2019. The charge was filed in response to the district placing former veteran math teach Greg Costa on paid administrative leave three weeks prior to his retirement.
“Teachers charged the district management retaliated against Costa for his union activity. Costa and other teachers had voiced concerns about what they perceived as the school principal’s bad management, specifically for disagreeing with the principal on issues such as teacher recruitment and retention,” states a press release from the Healdsburg Area Teachers Association (HATA) and the California Teachers Association (CTA).
According to the press release, the complaint, released on Jan. 16, means that PERB agrees that the allegations in the charge, if proven to be true, makes a “prima facie” claim that the district managers violated the law. Prima facie is a legal claim that has sufficient evidence to proceed to a trial or a judgement.
“Basically PERB is agreeing that our allegations warrant a hearing before a judge,” said HATA President Ever Flores.
To try to resolve the issue there will first be a mediation session, however, if both parties cannot resolve the dispute then a hearing before an administrative law judge will be set according to the press release.
“The district has formally denied all allegations of wrongdoing and we fully intend to honor the process, which includes meeting with the union in mediation in a good faith effort to positively resolve the concerns being raised,” Healdsburg Unified School District Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel said in an email. “I will not get into the details of this individual’s situation as he has privacy rights we strictly work to protect, but it is important to understand that the stage that we are at now should not be misinterpreted as the Public Employment Relations Board taking a position on the union’s allegations. Rather this is a step in PERB’s standard procedures.”
Vanden Heuvel pointed out that PERB is required to accept timely charges and move them forward and that the issuance of a complaint does not mean that PERB has taken a specific position on the charges.
As of press time, there has been no date set for the mediation session.
Flores said of the issue, “This hurt students more than anything else. A 30+ year veteran, Mr. Costa taught generations of students. And to pull him out so unceremoniously when his students needed him to prepare for final exams and state tests … well, the students felt short-changed.”
Incident overview
Prior to his leave Costa had accepted a district offered payment as an incentive to retire.
According to a May 2019 letter to the Healdsburg Junior High School (HJH) community from the Healdsburg Unified School District Board of Trustees, the offer was negotiated with the teacher’s union and has an incentive with a cash bonus based on 80% of their highest year’s income on top of their retirement package.
Costa was put on paid leave on April 26, 2019.
According to Michael Villa, a parent to an eighth grade student at HJH, one of the alleged incidents that may have led to Costa’s administrative leave was when he made a statement in class about retirement.
As told in a May 15, 2019 Healdsburg Tribune article about the incident, according to Villa’s daughter, Costa mentioned that he was thinking about retirement because he did not support the decisions of the current administration.
Villa thought the statement was alluding to the fact that teachers Sydnee Mardell and Serina Rasp were allegedly not offered tenure. Villa told the Tribune in an email in May 2019, “Mr. Costa did not mention Serina Rasp or Sydnee Mardell by name. But he nevertheless was upset by the administration’s decision to not extend their contracts. That upset, in turn, was part of the basis for his statement to his students, my daughter among them and who heard what he said, that, ‘I do not support the administration.’”
HATA President Ever Flores told the Tribune in May 2019 that he received a call on April 26 from the superintendent letting him know that Costa was going to be placed on paid leave.
“I asked the superintendent if he could wait so Greg could have representation and he said no. I was in L.A. so I couldn’t be here, so he spoke to Greg that day and gave him the letter and asked him to take the leave. I thought the conversation was going to be a reprimand letter, not a paid administrative leave,” Flores said.
Vanden Heuvel said that the district always allows employees to choose whether or not they want representation at meetings and that that choice was given to Costa.
Flores emphasized that usually paid administrative leave is reserved for a serious offense such as drug use, however, Vanden Heuvel said that administrative leave is typically used anytime there is a concern about an employee that the district feels is serious enough.
In the May 2019 letter to the HJH community from the Healdsburg Unified School District Board of Trustees, the trustees addressed the alleged classroom statement incident as, “Some employees may have been using their exit from the district as an opportunity to undermine certain administrators … This Board of Trustees finds it completely unacceptable for any employee to use students as the messengers for their concerns. Such actions violate our standards for conduct set forth in board policy.”
In a May 2019 letter from Flores to the board of trustees, Flores identified the paid leave incident as “unlawful retaliation.”
In part, the letter states, “Mr. Costa, like any unionized worker in the public sector in California, has the right to talk to his colleagues and to concerned community members about matters of public concern. Removing a 30-year educator from the classroom and disadvantaging dozens of his students in order to unlawfully silence a dissenting voice in the workspace, is certainly a matter of public concern, which can and should be shared by Costa and others broadly. Healdsburg taxpayers, as well as HATA, are rightfully concerned about your wasting of thousands of public education dollars in furtherance of a personal agenda of retaliation against Mr. Costa for his protected union activity.”
The letter continues by demanding that Costa be returned to his classroom.
HATA wasn’t the only group that demanded Costa’s return. The incident sparked a planned student protest at HJH on May 13, 2019.
Around 70 junior high school students walked out of their classrooms demanding the return of the teacher.
Parents and students attended a Healdsburg school board meeting that same week to voice their support for Costa.
Villa’s daughter, Sophia Villa, said during the May 15 meeting, “Mr. Costa isn’t only an extraordinary math teacher, but his a phenomenal person in general … Everyone loves Mr. Costa. As long as this is a problem, it is not just going to be the parents and adults on your back, it is going to be an army of 11- to 14-year-olds.”
