Education Notebook

Arbitrator: Rochester schools' summer staffing violated union contract

(A copy of the arbitrator's ruling is at the bottom. -EM)

Rochester public schools violated the terms of its collective bargaining agreement with the district's teachers by not basing summer staffing on seniority last year, an independent arbitrator has ruled.

Edina-based arbitrator Jeffrey W. Jacobs on May 11 ruled that school district officials violated the Rochester Education Association contract during the 2009 summer schedule. The judgment requires Rochester schools to pay the roughly 35 teachers who were passed over, a decision that likely will cost the district about $75,000.

Officials from the school district and the teachers union confirmed that estimate.

ARTICLES: First year of Rochester ALC full of second chances

(Ed: Here are two articles from Monday's paper about Rochester ALC, in its first year of operation. The students at the alternative learning center are catching up on their education and are dealing with issues like: truancy, substance abuse, homelessness and teen pregnancy. For whatever reason, these articles never appeared online.) These articles are here, still behind our print-only wall. But that is incorrectly marked. These were in Monday's edition. Here they are in full.)

Seventeen-year-old Eddie Espinobarros recalls being a third-grader, missing weeks of school at a time as his alcoholic father refused to bring him to school, instead using the morning to recover from last night's drunken stupor.

Almost a decade later, Espinobarros is still catching up for that lost time.

Espinobarros is a 10th-grader at the Rochester Alternative Learning Center, a secondary school program created this past fall for students who fail to succeed in a traditional school environment.

The school exists inside the cramped quarters of the Golden Hill Education Center, which is also home to the night school diploma program, the ninth-grade bridge transitions program, the Continuing Education Center for expecting teens and teenage parents and also Rochester Alternative Middle School. When those classes end for the day, the program houses night school. Seventy students are enrolled in the 10th through 12th grade ALC program, with 43 students in the 9th-grade bridge program and 36 students in RAMS.