Today the bargaining team spent several hours negotiating our master contract with the district. We are disappointed in many of the district’s proposals and priorities as they do not address the direct needs of our students or educators. Some of the districts proposals from today include:
- Eliminating our access to extra duty compensation for class coverage
- Limiting DCTA’s ability to communicate with educators through DPS email
- Limiting educators ability to handle grievances at a level 1
- Eliminating the employee benefit credit for those who have opted out of DPS benefits
- We believe that open positions within newly consolidated schools should be guaranteed positions for the employees of the identified schools for consolidation. This is in alignment with community members who gave their recommendations on school consolidation criteria to the school board. However, the district would like to treat consolidated schools as school closures. We will wait for their counter on this in the morning.
We invite you to attend in-person negotiations tomorrow, August 3 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the DPS Acoma Campus (1617 S Acoma Street, Denver, CO 802023). You can also watch the bargaining livestream at: www.vimeo.com/event/561744. During this time, we will engage in the traditional bargaining process and cover contract articles 13-29. We additionally plan on covering language around parental leave.
Each of us are impacted by a majority of the bargaining topics discussed today as well as the majority of tomorrow’s bargaining topics. Our voice and presence is essential when making decisions that directly impact our working conditions and our students’ achievement. Your presence at bargaining will make a difference, and our collective presence will send a message.