By Michael Miner
“The first week of this school year,” Cummings told me in a recent letter, “I received a call from Marshall’s principal, Donald Pittman, whose first words were ‘501.’ I asked him if he was selling jeans now. He said that 501 is the size of Marshall’s freshman class. They were expecting 250, but Keepin’ It Real caused such a sensation across the West Side that they registered twice as many freshmen as they expected. ‘We are the hottest school on the West Side,’ Pittman told me. ‘Every other West Side high school showed declines in freshman enrollments except us. Everyone wants to come to Marshall!’ He attributes the newfound popularity to the favorable publicity created by Keepin’ It Real. He asked us to come back and continue our work with his students, and we enthusiastically agreed, pending approval and funding from Pershing Road.”
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The “her” Pittman refers to is Reanetta Hunt, the board’s new communications director. Cummings says Hunt killed the program by telling Vallas that this year it would cost the board $400,000. “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” says Cummings. The single issue of Keepin’ It Real “came in at $18,000, which was absolutely exorbitant.” But, he adds, the cost was so high because there were no economies of scale. This year, he says, “we’d have stuck to $1,200 per issue from each school, matched by $1,200 from the school board.”
To demonstrate what she was talking about, Hunt faxed me the Austin Voice’s proposed budget for this school year. Cummings had projected a healthy $349,920 in total expenses, most of it in salaries for such positions as a program director ($45,900) and a publication supervisor ($27,000). On the income side of the ledger, true enough, the contribution from each of the six schools was pegged at $1,200 an issue for nine issues, or a total of $64,800, plus another $64,800 from the school board. That left a huge deficit, of which $108,000 supposedly would be covered by revenue from ads sold by the Voice and student salesmen. And $112,320 would roll in as foundation and corporate grants. The Voice and the public schools “will formulate a joint strategy for securing this amount,” Cummings mentioned in a footnote.
Sure, says Cummings. “Reanetta Hunt wants to put out some sort of PR piece and get the senior honors-English girls at Lane Tech and Whitney Young to write some poem, and she’ll print it. Well, that’s not our program.”
“The guild had a history of being confrontational with the company,” Lehmann told me when I asked him to reflect on the bargaining. “That was for a variety of reasons. The single most important was that, going back to the Field days, there was an ongoing position in the company to be confrontational with the guild. Whatever the ownership, they’ve always managed to start negatively, with what could be characterized as insulting initial proposals. The guild as a matter of course became prepared. So we have this arsenal of weapons that has been used, from informational picketing to leafleting of advertisers to writing advertisers and stockholders. We became a very aggressive union out of a need to maintain the integrity of the contract.”
Unit vice chair Charles Nicodemus, the moral center of the newsroom and the hound of heaven at the heels of Patrick Huels and Edward Burke, was probably negotiating his last guild contract. He’s expected to retire before the new contract expires in 2001. “He has poured his soul into the guild,” Lehmann said of Nicodemus, and this negotiation was his swan song. And as it happened, Nicodemus questioned the high road Lehmann was taking to agreement. A master of brinkmanship, Nicodemus had been radicalized (Lehmann’s word) by the way the Field brothers shut down his old paper, the Daily News, back in 1978, and he harbors deep doubts about management’s willingness to do anything decent voluntarily.
