Town Hall Invitation
All teachers are invited to our virtual Town Hall on October 8th!
During this Town Hall we will:
- Provide information about negotiations for Virtual School and for our first contract
- Break out into sites to discuss and give information to Unite Summit’s bargaining team about what is most important for a sustainable Virtual School model
We will hold the Town Hall Thursday October 8th, 5:15-6:30.
Register here. (https://tinyurl.com/UNITESUMMITTOWNHALL)
Virtual School Negotiations
Unite Summit has met with SPS several times in an attempt to negotiate changes to virtual school. Open, honest, and timely communication has been an important goal of US. After our last meeting on September 15, US thought we had come to a shared understanding with SPS regarding the Habits and Content block being basically a rebrand of office hours, as well as leaving meeting times up to the discretion of site leaders. US emailed Diane Tavenner to confirm our understanding, with a deadline of September 21 to send revisions if she did not agree. She did email US on the 17th informing US she did not agree to our shared understanding, and she would email us with revisions. US wrote a newsletter that we felt properly and truthfully reflected all of these events while also acknowledging Tavenner’s disagreement. The intent behind sending our newsletter before Tavenner could send corrections was to keep our members informed about their urgent needs, and to follow through on our commitment of clear, timely communication.
These events — and the differences between our understanding of the conditions of virtual school last year — has made clear that we need to have a much more detailed agreement with Summit about virtual school. As a result, based on the feedback from our town hall, we will be returning to the bargaining table in the coming weeks to ensure we have a clear agreement on virtual school.
Unfair Labor Practice
As we shared this summer, we believe that Summit broke labor law in how it conducted the bargaining around the pay freeze, including by not giving us sufficient time to bargain, not providing us with requested information in a timely manner, and almost doubling the number of threatened layoffs in the middle of bargaining. While restoring our pay was an important and positive step forward, we believe that Summit still needs to be held accountable when we believe they don’t respect our rights. Therefore, last week we filed our fifth Unfair Labor Practice against Summit about their conduct during the pay freeze negotiations. You can read our filing here.