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Volume 09, Number 1: April 21, 2009
BARGAINING OPENS IN THE MIDST OF Bargaining for this year’s salary and benefit re-openers began with a “meet and greet” session on March 25th and a second, more substantial session was held on April 15th. It is clear that with money as tight as it is, both sides want to keep language bargaining to a minimum. Management has indicated that there are two major language/salary issues that it wants to discuss; a re-negotiation of many of the existing supplements and the middle school teacher duty day. On the first issue, supplements, the two sides have been meeting in committee for several months looking at different ways of cutting the total cost of our supplement package while at the same time dealing with some of the inequities that have been reported over the years. The work of that committee should be finished within the next several weeks. The middle school teacher duty day has become an issue of late as the high school teachers have recently gone to a teaching load similar to that of the elementary schools as they moved away from block scheduling. That change required no change in contract language as their contract already provided for a non-block schedule. This leaves the middle school teachers with a teaching load that is less than that of all other teachers in the county. The superintendent, in an attempt to reduce the budget and minimize the upcoming layoffs, has proposed a middle school duty day that more closely mirrors that of high school and elementary teachers. Their proposal called for one 55-minute planning period during the student day for middle school teachers down from their present total of 90 minutes of planning during the student day and a total planning time of 105 minutes per day. Management has said it will consider going to a junior high schedule if agreement cannot be reached on this issue as that would gain similar financial savings and would not violate the existing contract language regarding middle school teacher planning time. We are heading into bargaining expecting anywhere from a 0% increase in our funding to a 10% decrease from the state. We are looking at laying off large numbers of teachers for the first time in our recent history. The original budget document for next year failed to fund our step increments and longevity increases. Unions around the state are having contracts imposed on them as school districts are frequently not funding step increments and/or previously agreed upon salary increases. All this portends a very difficult year at the bargaining table. Our main bargaining priority has been to maintain our salary and longevity schedules and not allow them to slide backwards followed closely by our desire to minimize the number of our colleagues being laid off this spring. We also head into bargaining season knowing that we will need to go back to the voters next Spring asking them to re-approve our voted millage and while the money that millage has raised has decreased from its peak of $60.5 million a year to the projected $42.6 million for next year, it is money we can hardly afford to do without. The School Board is expected to meet in executive session this evening to discuss bargaining. The results of that meeting will dictate the tone of the upcoming bargaining sessions. The next bargaining session is scheduled for Wednesday, April 22nd at the SC/TA office |