On Wednesday, November 4, we had our 14th bargaining session with Summit. Our most significant discussions were around Summit’s Support Services proposal and our Discipline and Dismissal proposal.
Summit presented the following proposals:
- Organizational Security
- Evaluation
- Shared Governance
- Professional Development & Support Services (combined)
Summit also provided thoughts on our Intellectual Property proposal but declined to present a counterproposal.
We presented the following counterproposals. Highlighting indicates a change from our previous proposal:
Professional Development & Support Services
Back in March and April, we submitted two of our most important original proposals: Professional Development and Student Support Services. Summit wrote what they characterized as a combined counter-proposal. However, their proposal did little to address the sections of our proposal to provide more supports for students.
The professional development portion of Summit’s proposal would allow teachers to give input to their site leadership about professional development. In contrast with our previous proposal, “input” is not meaningfully protected nor robust enough for teachers to influence professional development.
There is no support services portion of Summit’s proposal, despite the proposal title. We explained that these services are a priority for our union. Our union will continue to push for greater services for English Learners and students with disabilities and to provide more counseling to benefit all of our students. We know these supports are important to our members and will continue to push for this in our upcoming counterproposal.
Discipline and Dismissal
We presented our counter-proposal to Summit’s proposal from two weeks ago. We have highlighted changes from our last proposal. In our new proposal we:
- Adjusted our language protecting the school community’s safety, including circumstances where students and non-teaching staff are targets of unacceptable behavior. We propose that teachers have “a right to a workplace free of harassment, sexual harassment, abuse, and discrimination.” If there is any such misconduct in the community, HR would be accountable for investigating this.
- Included a process for fair, neutral investigations that holds HR accountable to investigating an incident or circumstance and holds SPS accountable for applying discipline and dismissal only if there is a valid reason for it. (See proposal items 1, 3, 4, and 5.)
- Included a portion of Summit’s last proposal to place a teacher on immediate paid administrative leave during an investigation for misconduct that creates a “threat to health and safety.”