What Teachers Saying about the Agreement - Uh Oh

 A reader - Unhappy - posted this comment in another post:

The teacher's contract will impact every child within Seattle Public Schools. Yet, the contract is considered confidential. Only teachers and the district have seen contract. 

SEA signed off on the Special Education Taskforce proposal. Now, they will force teachers to accept agreement by not having complete agreement available, only requiring 51 percent of teachers to vote etc.

He/She/They may have hit on something because over at the SEA Facebook page, there is a lot of this:

Vote NO to suspend the strike without seeing the full contract language! This is not what members have said loudly and clearly that they need. We need 48 hours, at least, to review the language before deciding to end the strike.

Apparently, teachers are being asked to vote yes to end the strike BEFORE they have read the entire agreement, not just a summary. Hmmm.

Teacher 1

So that’s the thing 95% of the SEA general membership voted to only suspend the strike once a TA was reached, reviewed and passed by the general membership which is our democratic right, to renig on that now would not only inequitable but a violation of the democratic process and just down right wrong.

Teacher 2

No I do not have 100% trust because they have burned us before we gave them the benefit of the doubt and they are trying to make us vote to end the strike before even seeing the TA.

Teacher 3

I am so sorry but I was doing this for student supports and I need this strike to be worth it before I leave the picket line.

Teacher 4

I cannot in good faith vote to suspend the strike without reading the tentative agreement myself. This is extremely upsetting. A teacher wouldn't expect students to read a book and take an exam on that same day.

Teacher 5

We need the proper time to review this . We are not agreeing to a summary or highlights .

Teacher 6

We’re not suspending the strike until we approve the TA. The membership spoke and voted a few weeks ago.

On the other hand:

I trust our bargaining team. They have been at the table for months, forgoing seeing their families, and they know what we are fighting for. This is not about trust in the district, this is about trust in those who have spent every moment in their waking hours fighting for us and what we have asked them to fight for.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I hope that this TA passes and the strike is lifted. If I remember correctly, in 2015 we voted to pass the TA and go back to work the next day. I'm sure the TA is not perfect, but it's a collective bargaining agreement-in theory, both sides would give in a bit. I think it's also important to remember that one contract cannot suddenly fix years of under-funding and mismanagement. The community supports the teachers, but unlike many other unions, the teachers are more beholden to the public (after all, they are PUBLIC school teachers). I would hope that people trust the bargaining team to do the best that they could. I'm reminded of something I often told my students: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."-FormerTeacher
9/13/22, 11:56 AM
Anonymous said…
The chatter on the socials won’t sit well with parents. 72 hours to view the TA before voting to end the strike is three more days of missed school, paid care needed for kids, and time to make up what would otherwise have been scheduled breaks. The cost of living increase being (unofficially) shared is a lot more than folks working in a pre-recession economy can expect to get. SEA needs to wrap this up - parents and taxpayers only have so much patience.

Hustle
9/13/22, 1:08 PM
Melissa Westbrook said…
So Hustle,
What I'm hearing from teacher friends is that they would like to read the whole thing but 1) don't they trust the bargaining team? and 2) the blowback from parents. So I think you are right.
9/13/22, 1:14 PM
PTAPrezDad said…
I'm seeing chatter on twitter about a 7% pay increase in the TA. Was that the figure leaked that Hustle is referring to?
9/13/22, 1:32 PM
Anonymous said…
They don’t want to share it because they know sped kids are getting screwed. They’re parents will see the deal and maybe figure it out. A lot of teachers might be ok with it, but families who were only represented by SCPTSA who have an agenda besides them.

Reader
9/13/22, 1:34 PM
cloudles said…
If the teachers accept a proposal that gives them the higher pay and doesn't address staff support for SPED and ELL and mental health, they will lose the parents. Starting to see some teacher comments on twitter about what's in the proposal. Who does the negotiation for SEA, and why would the teachers trust them?

I'm surprised I didn't hear about the proposal for the SPED/ELL inclusion in the MTSS model in GenEd until now. Was that a secret until now?

Cloudy
9/13/22, 4:37 PM
Anonymous said…
Reader, no. Every sped teacher I talked to (distinct, resource, access) was happy with it. It is an improvement on what we have now, preserves ratios, and makes it harder for the district to ignore overages. Just adding that one IA in my building is a game-changer for inclusion. It means I can meet kids' minutes with support, so they won't have to be pulled out nearly as much. The meeting was a fiasco, a group basically filibustering by abusing the questions and parliamentary rules, preventing discussion of the actual TA, and making all about adult issues rather than getting kids back in school. Willing to bet a lot of that social media chatter is from the same voices.
Seattlelifer
9/13/22, 9:30 PM
Anonymous said…
Thanks Lifer,

If it preserves ratios parents will be happy. If it doesn’t, how will students even know which school to attend if there’s no actual program where they thought they were assigned to, which they were assigned to because of the program? What a bunch of thoughtless dimwits. “Let’s change everything for no good reason, to prove we did something.”

Reader
9/14/22, 7:09 AM
Anonymous said…
If the sped staffing ratios have been negatively impacted or if the delivery of sometimes already-weak sped services is worsened in anyway, parents are NOT going to be happy after the past 3 years. So let's hope the bargaining team didn't screw up.

Mitt
9/14/22, 8:28 AM
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