This week, the bargaining team spent two entire days negotiating our master contract with the district. During that time, we covered contract articles 13-29. We additionally had conversations around paid family leave. Some of our proposals from yesterday’s session include:
- Providing educators 4 additional weeks of FMLA for parental leave making a total of 16 weeks
- Providing educators with pay for any unused sick time.
- Increasing personal and bereavement time.
- Continuing to provide educators with COVID leave.
- Putting procedures in place for those who experience intimidation/retaliation for filing a grievance. DPS rejected all of our solutions for protections against retaliation.
- Guaranteeing SSPs workspaces to perform their duties. We must ensure that DPS is following the minimums as required by law.
- Guaranteeing sufficient instructional materials and equipment. Denver Public Schools stated that they would endeavor to provide these materials despite us offering multiple solutions.
- Educators at 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. The district would still like to treat consolidated schools as school closures.
Some of the district’s proposals from Tuesday August 2nd are still on the table. These proposals 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 will return to the bargaining table in-person next week. We invite you to attend our upcoming in-person bargaining sessions next week on:
- Tuesday, August 9th at the DPS Acoma Campus (1617 S Acoma Street, Denver, CO 80223) 9 AM – 5 PM
- Bargaining topics: The rights of BIPOC educators, Article 19 and Articles 21-29. At 2 p.m. we will be joined by researchers at CU Boulder who will present their study findings on bias within the LEAP evaluation system.
- Wednesday, August 10th at the DPS Acoma Campus (1617 S Acoma Street, Denver, CO 80223) 9 AM – 5 PM
- Bargaining topics: The rights of BIPOC educators, Article 19 and Articles 21-29.
Our union’s strength is in our numbers, that is why your presence at every bargaining session is essential! Make a plan with your colleagues to join us for in-person bargaining!
Our contract expires on August 31st so over the course of this month we will continue to negotiate around many articles of the DCTA contract including the salary schedule, our cost of living adjustment and class sizes. We will communicate future bargaining dates and topics as they become available.