by Mary Rupert
Teacher negotiations are scheduled to go to a federal mediator today in Kansas City, Kan.
Patricia Hodison, president of the National Education Association of Kansas City, Kan., NEA-KCK, said they hope to reach an agreement tonight, but if not, the negotiations will move into the next step, fact-finding.
At Tuesday night’s school board meeting, some teachers addressed the board about negotiations, and on a street outside the building, teachers were holding signs about it.
The teachers are working under last year’s contract, and the contract negotiations are for the current year, she said.
Hodison said some of the main issues are salary, due process and planning time.
“It’s not that we are in complete disagreement about the amount of money, it’s how we use it,” Hodison said about salary.
The district has proposed a change in the salary schedule, she said. The current salary schedule allows teachers to be competitive with other districts as they gain more experience, according to Hodison. The new board proposal would reverse that, making the district less competitive for experienced teachers, and reducing the lifetime earnings of teachers in the district, she said.
On due process, the teachers want the district to put language in the contract restoring the appeal hearing that was removed by the state Legislature two years ago, she said. Some other districts have added the language to their contracts to guarantee an appeals hearing, she said.
On the issue of planning time, Hodison said teachers want to have a minimum amount of planning time guaranteed, in which they can call parents, grade papers and work on individual instruction plans for children. While they currently have a planning time, teachers want enough time for planning, she added. It should be time that is not taken up with additional meetings and paperwork, she added.
“We hope that the board has heard their teachers, especially the teachers that came forward to speak Tuesday night at the board meeting, and understand how important these issues are and be able to come to an agreement,” Hodison said.
There was a lot of uncertainty during the past year about whether the Legislature was going to appropriate funds for the districts, how much it would be, and the case in the Kansas Supreme Court about school funding. Those events contributed to the delays of the salary discussions, she said.
“Aside from that, we’ve met several times but we just haven’t been able to come to agreement on these last issues,” Hodison said.
“We aren’t necessarily at total opposite ends,” she said. “We just weren’t making progress. It was time to move toward a mediator.”
“At this moment, going into mediation, what we’re really looking for is for the district to show that they really value teachers and the work that they do, and understand that they not only need to have fair compensation, but also to feel they are respected as professionals,” she said. That is where issues such as planning time come into play, she added.
“That’s what’s really important to teachers, to have the conditions they need to be really excellent teachers,” Hodison said.
David Smith, Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools spokesman, said that because negotiations are in mediation, it is not appropriate for the administration to go outside of that process and comment on negotiations to the press. He said he believes that may undermine the work they need to do directly across the table with the teachers in order to come to an agreement.
“We want to come to an agreement, we believe our teachers deserve to be adequately compensated, we’re fighting at the state level to get the resources we can, and we’ll do the best we can to come up with an agreement,” Smith said.
