Last week, your DCTA Bargaining Team met with the District on April 7 and April 9 to continue negotiations. Over the course of both sessions, we exchanged counterproposals on multiple articles.
Wins and Movement:
- We’re close to a tentative agreement on Article 33, securing protections for JROTC instructors.
- We moved the District forward on Career and Technical Education (CTE) and ESLI issues—thanks to the powerful member stories that brought these issues to life.
- We continued conversations around equitable family leave—an area where the district acknowledged the current policy doesn’t reflect their stated values.
- We maintained our position on CSC involvement in job-sharing decisions.
Despite the hundreds of hours our team has spent crafting real, comprehensive solutions to urgent issues—class size, workload, planning time, and equity, the District might as well have just brought a red pen to the table. They struck down the majority of our proposals without offering any meaningful counters.
The District’s “Counter Proposals”:
- The District responded to our class size and workload proposals by ignoring the concerns of thousands of educators—claiming that our current class sizes and workloads are not an issue. To make matters worse, they threatened to pull their insulting 0.47% COLA offer, suggesting they could reduce class sizes instead of paying us even a fraction of a cost-of-living increase.
- DPS has spent months insisting that class size can only be addressed through bargaining—but when we showed up with language, they had nothing.
- We proposed transparency around educator retention, particularly for BIPOC and historically marginalized educators, and introduced protections against deadnaming. The District responded by striking out all of the language. DPS cannot claim to value equity while actively rejecting the language that would help protect historically marginalized educators.
We’ll be at the table every Monday for the rest of the school year. Your voice and your presence matter. Showing up in force keeps the pressure on the District and shows them we won’t back down. Let’s make our demands loud and clear:
Respect Us. Pay Us. Value Us.
