School Workers’ Bill Defeated Vote Blocking Non-Teachers From Voting Shows Boise Shift

Last November’s conservative shift in what has long been a Republican-dominated Legislature was obvious Friday as the Senate defeated school employee legislation it easily approved just a year ago.

On an 18-16 vote, the Senate rejected requiring school boards to meet once a year with non-teaching employees on salaries and other working conditions.

“They don’t have to negotiate; they don’t have to agree with them,” Democratic Sen. Tim Tucker of Porthill said. “They just have to listen. They just have to give their employees the courtesy of an audience. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

The meet-and-confer requirement for employees like secretaries, bus drivers and custodians, which cleared the Senate on a 21-11 vote in 1994, falls short of teachers’ negotiating rights.

But the majority of 21 senators agreeing with Tucker a year ago turned into a minority of 16 on Friday.

Three of Tucker’s 1994 Republican allies - Dean Cameron of Rupert, Mel Richardson of Idaho Falls and Grant Ipsen of Boise - switched allegiances, and five of the eight new Republican members joined them.

As was the case a year ago, the bill probably had no future even if it had cleared the Senate. It almost certainly would have been buried in the even more conservative House Education Committee.

The only vocal opposition on the Senate floor reflected the hostile attitude of a number of lawmakers toward the Idaho Education Association, the state’s largest and most politically active labor organization.

The bill, Republican Rod Beck of Boise charged, “will tend to open up the door to have our state’s largest union have a tighter stranglehold on our children’s education.”

Beck, who regained the seat last fall that he lost in the 1990 voter backlash to the abortion debate he helped lead, tried unsuccessfully to sidetrack the bill so it would not come to a final vote.

In an attempt to ease opposition, supporters had included a provision that would have automatically repealed the requirement in three years unless the Legislature continued it.