Week of January 18, 2021

This month has already been very busy with negotiations and will continue to be very busy. Three of the four contracts - Food Service, Para-Educators, and Teachers - are actively negotiating contracts. As you know, the Para-Educators contract expired on June 30th. That team has been working since June 2019 on a successor agreement. Negotiations were interrupted by COVID-19 and have since resumed. It is our hope to have a tentative agreement in place before the end of this school year. We are working on alternative plans for a ratification meeting that will not put members in large groups. Recently, the Board of Directors approved an electronic voting and ratification meeting process that will be utilized if it is not safe to hold an in-person meeting. More on that to come.

Both the Food Service and Teachers contracts expire on August 31, 2021. In an effort to be proactive, both negotiating teams began working internally in the fall of 2019 with the hopes of starting negotiations in the spring of 2020 which would have been about 6 months earlier than normal. With COVID-19, our plans were stymied. Teacher negotiations finally began on December 14th and we have had another session since. There are already two more sessions scheduled for February. Our Food Service team has been meeting internally and will have the first session with the district on January 21st.

Prior to the start of each negotiations season, the membership of each unit was given the opportunity to answer a survey about their contract. The results were tallied and shared at membership meetings, and then used by the negotiating teams to form proposals and guide negotiations. As we have information that can be shared with the membership, we will provide that to you.