How The Teachers Union And A Board Member Transformed Chula Vista Elementary School District

By Jim Hinch, the Voice of San Diego

April 14, 2025

It was the autumn of 2019 and teacher contract negotiations had broken down in the Chula Vista Elementary School District. Teachers wanted a raise. District leaders wouldn’t budge.

The district’s five-member Board of Trustees met with then-Superintendent Francisco Escobedo at district headquarters to figure out what to do. Former board member Laurie Humphrey, who was at the meeting, recalls someone piping up with a suggestion.

“What if one of the Board members were to go and see if we can get them to come to agreement?” Humphrey remembers someone – she no longer recalls who – saying. “Cut through the middleman.”

Escobedo objected. “It’s not the Board’s place to intervene,” he said. It could send a signal that district negotiators weren’t up to the job, and all the union had to do was hold out long enough and they’d get to bargain directly with the district’s top bosses.

Two board members, Eduardo Reyes and Francisco Tamayo, dismissed Escobedo’s concerns and enthusiastically supported the plan, Humphrey recalls.

Tamayo reminded everyone he’d learned how to bargain contracts during a previous job in a neighboring school district, where he’d led the union representing non-teaching staff. The choice of emissary to the contract talks seemed obvious, Humphrey said. The board sent Tamayo to the bargaining table.

A few weeks later, teachers got their raise – roughly 2 percent on top of a similar raise the previous year, plus one additional day off to sweeten the offer, Humphrey said.

It wasn’t the first – or the last–time Tamayo would play a personal role in helping the teachers union obtain favorable outcomes in the 28,000-student Chula Vista district, whose 50 schools comprise the largest elementary school district in California.

Since his arrival on the school board 11 years ago, Tamayo said he has sought to “shift” the district away from what he described as an “adversarial” relationship with the teachers union toward what he called “a true partnership” with union leaders.

The effort has included involving himself in contract negotiations on at least three separate occasions, helping other union-friendly candidates run for seats on the board, giving union leaders early access to school board agendas, helping to hire Reyes, a union ally, as superintendent in 2021 and even engaging in an unusual mid-term election campaign last year to unseat a fellow board member who had clashed with the union.

Above all, Tamayo has forged what he called a close personal “friendship” with current union president Rosi Martinez, who has served in union leadership as either president or vice president for eight of the 11 years Tamayo has been on the school board.

The relationship – which Martinez also described as a “warm personal relationship” – has included spending time together with family and friends in Cancun, celebrating birthdays, attending parties and other events, and a 2022 campaign fundraiser for Tamayo hosted by Martinez at her house. Last year, Martinez campaigned alongside Tamayo on the streets of Chula Vista during his bid for another four years on the school board.

During the years Tamayo and Martinez have worked together, teachers’ salaries have risen close to 17 percent and the district has adopted numerous union-sought policies, including hiring more mental and behavioral health staff, agreeing to robust classroom safety measures when teachers returned to in-person instruction after the Covid-19 pandemic and, according to Martinez, giving teachers more overall “input into decision-making” in the district.

Tamayo said he is proud of the work he has done to bring “a new mentality” to Chula Vista that “the union is a partner.” But he acknowledged that the closer relationship between the union and district leadership has not yet translated into academic gains for students.

Test scores remain roughly where they were when he first joined the school board, Tamayo said. And scores are lower than they were before the pandemic, while chronic absenteeism has risen 15 percent, according to a national database that tracks school districts’ post-pandemic performance. Over the past five years, the district has fared little better, and in some cases worse, in academic performance and rates of chronic absenteeism when compared with other California districts with similar demographic profiles, according to the database.

This year, as one-time infusions of pandemic recovery funds run out, the district faces a $15 million deficit, even as it is in the midst of raising teachers’ salaries by 12 percent over three years – a union-sought provision recently awarded in the latest round of contract talks.

Looking back, Humphrey said, she would not have agreed to send Tamayo to help broker a contract agreement with the teachers union if she had known of his close relationship with Martinez and the full extent of his pro-union stance.

“Tamayo knew full well he had this relationship with Rosi,” Humphrey said. “And for him to suggest he would go in there [to participate in contract negotiations] seems so inappropriate to me now…It seems like a conflict of interest.”

Tamayo was first elected to the school board in 2014. At the time, he was a supervisor overseeing digital security operations in the Sweetwater Union High School District. He also had served as president of the Sweetwater district’s classified employees union, which represents workers without a teaching credential.

The Chula Vista teachers union did not endorse Tamayo that year, he said. The union favored another candidate. But Tamayo, buoyed by his own union connections and an endorsement from the Democratic Party, won anyway.

He soon made friends with the teachers union. At the time, under former Superintendent Escobedo, Tamayo said the district was not considered union-friendly.

“When I got there, [district administrators’ attitude] was: ‘This is our stance and we’re not budging,’” Tamayo recalled. Along with Reyes and another union-friendly board member, Tamayo said he sought “to shift that to look for a win-win situation” with teachers.

Escobedo, who served as superintendent of the Chula Vista district for 11 years before leaving in 2021 to become director of a San Diego organization that helps to improve urban schools, declined to comment for this story.

Tamayo offered to meet monthly with union leaders to hear their concerns. He urged Escobedo to give the union an early look at school board agendas so they could voice objections before board meetings, giving the district time to modify proposals before bringing them to the public.

“I’m not saying the union is always right,” Tamayo said. “But I know there are some things that can improve the relationship.”

Three years after Tamayo joined the board, teachers elected Martinez vice president of the teachers union. She, too, came to her position intending to reset relations between teachers and district leaders.

“Under the previous administration in the district, it was a more top-down culture,” Martinez said. “I have worked to build a positive relationship between the union and the board and the union and the district leadership.”

Martinez’s relationship with Tamayo was especially close.

In 2018, Martinez and Tamayo, along with their families and some friends, ran into each other at the airport in Mexico City, both of them said. They both happened to be on their way to spending the district’s fall break in Cancun. A photo Tamayo posted on Facebook shows him and Martinez posing in the airport alongside fellow Chula Vista board member Armando Farias, who was traveling with Tamayo.

“Layover at Mexico City!!!” Tamayo wrote in the Facebook post. “Cancun here we come!”

While in Cancun, Tamayo celebrated a birthday at a restaurant alongside his family and friends, including Martinez and her fiance, who were staying at the same resort. A Facebook photo of the birthday cake served at the dinner includes a comment from Martinez: “Congratulations my dear Francisco!!!! Thank you for sharing your big day! God always fill you with joy and blessings!!!”

Photos posted by Tamayo on other occasions show him smiling with Martinez at a 50th birthday party she threw for herself at her house in 2019 and marching alongside Martinez at a political rally in downtown San Diego.

In 2022, Martinez hosted a re-election campaign fundraiser for Tamayo at her house. A flyer for the event invited attendees to “join host Rosi Martinez” at an evening reception where donors were encouraged to give up to $500 to Tamayo’s campaign.

That same year, Tamayo’s and Martinez’s relationship became widely known enough in the district that a school principal reported rumors about it to the district’s human resources department. The district opened an investigation.

“At the direction of the Superintendent, an outside law firm was hired to investigate the allegations [of an improper relationship between Tamayo and Martinez] as soon as the allegations were reported to him,” district spokesperson Giovanna Castro said in a statement to Voice of San Diego. “After a thorough investigation, the law firm determined that there were no facts to substantiate the allegations.”

The district, citing attorney-client privilege, declined to provide a copy of the law firm’s investigation to Voice of San Diego.

Tamayo and Martinez said their close bond stemmed from nothing more than a shared desire to move the Chula Vista district in what Tamayo called a more “labor-friendly” direction.

“It’s a professional relationship,” Tamayo said of his connection to Martinez. “Yes, we have a friendship because we’ve worked together for the past 11 years. But that’s it.”

Martinez, likewise, said her relationship with Tamayo had always been “professional” and “related to my work for the union, my advocacy for the union and our students…It has been my intent to be part of a shift that provides [union] members a seat at the table. That has been my intent, and I believe I have been successful.”

The same year Martinez hosted a campaign fundraiser for Tamayo, the union’s political action committee drew up a list of reasons why union members should support Tamayo’s re-election bid.

Among reasons listed in the document: Tamayo “Directed CVESD Bargaining team to finalize the Restructured Salary Schedule in 2019-20, Safety MOU 2021, and the Tentative Agreement and Safety MOU’s in 2022.”

The contract provisions mentioned in the document refer to the 2 percent salary increase Tamayo helped to negotiate in 2019, a comprehensive list of post-pandemic classroom health protections for teachers and students in 2021 and another 2.5 percent salary increase in 2022 accompanied by a one-time 3 percent bonus.

Other reasons to support Tamayo listed in the document include his willingness to “meet (…) regularly with [union] leadership to listen and find solutions” and his “strong” support for giving teachers a “voice” in the previous year’s hiring process for a new superintendent.

Tamayo is “labor friendly” and a “strong advocate” for union interests, the document says. He “voted to approve…our contracts in all his eight years.”

Campaign records show that virtually all of Tamayo’s financial support in the 2022 election came either from current or former Chula Vista teachers or from the district’s teachers union and other local unions, who together donated more than three-fifths of the $47,703 Tamayo raised that year.

Last year, the Chula Vista teachers union essentially funded Tamayo’s entire campaign against fellow board member Kate Bishop, whom Tamayo sought to unseat by running against her while still in the middle of his own four-year term on the board. The union donated all but $4,000 of the $41,000 Tamayo raised in that race.

Following Tamayo’s victory over Bishop in November, Martinez personally swore him into office alongside fellow election winner Lucy Ugarte at a Dec. 16 ceremony at district headquarters. Photos from the event show Tamayo taking the oath of office wearing a “Chula Vista Educators” t-shirt.

Tamayo said he wore the union t-shirt and invited Martinez to administer his oath of office as “a nod to her because she was – the union was the one who supported [me] when big labor did not.”

Tamayo’s campaign against Bishop, who had occasionally questioned union priorities, was controversial in Democratic circles and led to recent moves by party leaders to censure both Tamayo and Ugarte, who ran together as a slate. The Chula Vista teachers union, Tamayo said, bucked the party and supported him anyway.

Tamayo denied that his support for teachers, or the union’s support for his election campaigns, was in any way transactional. Every time he had played a role in contract negotiations, he said, he had done so with full approval from other school board members. And he said he doesn’t always agree to union demands.

Recently, he said, he has made clear to union leaders that, facing a deficit, the district will have to make hard choices about programs teachers favor, such as additional mental health assistance for students.

“I say to the union, ‘This is your priority. But this is the cost,’” Tamayo said. “What do you want me to cut” to continue funding that priority?

Overall, Tamayo said, he supports teachers because “supporting teachers means supporting kids…Many things teachers ask for,” such as pandemic safety protocols, are also good for students.

And there is always the danger that, if Chula Vista doesn’t keep up with salary trends in other districts, experienced teachers will leave. “We need to make ourselves more competitive,” Tamayo said of Chula Vista Elementary. “If we rank low among districts in salary, it’s hard to recruit good teachers.”

Martinez said that, under her leadership and with what she described as “the collective advocacy of our whole membership,” Chula Vista teachers’ salaries have risen from 33rd highest in the county to being in the top 10.

Ron Marcus, a third-grade teacher at Wolf Canyon Elementary School and a former leader of the union’s political action committee, said he and other teachers have appreciated the rising salaries and other union gains in recent years.

But he said some teachers were disturbed by the union’s standalone alliance with Tamayo in last year’s divisive school board election. And he said Martinez’s and Tamayo’s close relationship had created a sense in the district “that there’s not accountability” in the union’s relationship with district leaders.

“You want the school board to hold the superintendent accountable and the union holding the school board accountable,” Marcus said. “There’s a lack of accountability because of friendships between people who should be honest people who hold each other at a professional distance…These friendships make it hard for district leaders and union leaders to make decisions in the best interests of the district.”

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