CHTU Updates

Negotiations Update – 7.19.16

Dear Colleagues,

As of yesterday, we have completed 5.5 days of bargaining that started June 14.  Although we have had productive discussions and have several tentative agreements, we have not yet started to negotiate anything financial.  We believe that it is essential to work out contract language issues before getting into raises and benefits.  Therefore there is no package to consider voting up or down at this point.

Every session has been facilitated through a federal mediator.  At this point we are in a strange holding pattern because the Board team did not

Dear Colleagues,

Negotiations Update:
Our Union sent a notice to the Board to negotiate a new contract on March 21.  We followed up on April 7 with 7 possible dates from April 19 to May 10 when we would be available to meet.  Vice-President Schaner and I first met with the Board team and a Federal Mediator on May 5 to discuss the style of negotiations and the ground rules.
We have decided to use the same style as 3 years ago - critical issues bargaining. 
We have been informed by the Board that are only willing to negotiate a 1 year contract based on the District's current 5 year forecast.
We have

As many of you have seen in the news, Detroit teachers staged a walkout based on not being assured they would be paid through the summer.  The district was going to run out of money.  This was one of the arguments that Schmida and I made against going to year round pay.  The bargaining poll at the time let us know that members wanted year round pay so we negotiated it, but this business in Detroit brings back some of my fears around the issue.

Special Olympics for the area will be held this Saturday, May 7.  Help is needed.  Contact Dan Russell, intervention specialist at Gearity to take

Dear Colleagues,
Thank you to all who were able to show up at the Board meeting on Tuesday.  I am pretty sure that the Board noticed that there were a lot of people concerned about the decisions being made.  Even if they did not acknowledge this publicly, I am sure they are having ongoing conversations asking in private what they do not want to say in public.  We will be discussing next steps at our Executive Board meeting this afternoon.

What everyone forgot about was the adoption of the new school calendars for the next two school years.  The Board voted to accept the administration's

Dear Colleagues,
3 announcements:

More That A Score - February 17.
At each of our elementary schools there will be an event co-hosted by the Heights Coalition for Public Education and PTA.  These "Walk-Ins" are a celebration of the staff and students at the school.  Each school is organizing a little differently, but if you are asked to participate in the morning of February 17 please try to be available.  Our event is also linked with the Alliance for Reclaiming Our Schools which is having Walk-Ins across the county.


Retirement:
If you are eligible to retire with 30 or fewer years in STRS and have

Dear Colleagues

Improvement Plans – I learned over the weekend from the OFT that the rules around Improvement Plans changed on November 17.  The change is very positive.  Instead of placing teachers on Improvement Plans based solely on student growth measures it must be done on their summative evaluation.  This is huge.  I am pretty sure that all 61 teachers on Improvement Plans this year would not have been placed on one if this was in place last year.  As soon as I learned of the change I started a discussion through email with ARC asking for this change to be made effective immediately.  We

Dear Colleagues,
Welcome back from the long weekend.  I hope you were able to enjoy family, friends, or just the time away from work.

Flexible Spending - you should have an email from Sondra Clark that was sent on Wednesday with documents to enroll in a Flexible Spending Account (FSA 125 plan).  There are two types.  One is for medical bills that are not covered (like lasik surgery, eyeglasses above our small amount, prescription co-pays, orthodontia above our $2,700 limit or things not covered by our plan).  The other is for child or elder care, which is more often used by our members. 

Dear Colleagues,
In addition to all the regular chaos of our profession I would like to highlight a few items of interest:

Hat and Glove Collection: At every building our members are donating hats and glove for students in need.  At each building the steward will know is collecting and who is the point person for giving out the hats and gloves to kids who need them.  Please consider donating something so there is a stash in your building before it gets too cold.  Students do better in class when they come to school not frozen.

Union Made/Fair Trade/Student Produced:  Thanks to everyone who has

Dear Colleagues,

One would have to buy into Student Growth Measures being valid to accept that teachers have been put on “improvement plans” to help them become better teachers. Fortunately, I am not among the believers, mostly because I am pretty sure I still have a grip on some sense of reality.  For teachers with SLOs, I believe teachers were put on “improvement plans” because either reasonable growth targets were rejected on their SLOs last year or there was no way to know how to guess how much student scores might grow during the year, or a combination of the two.  If teachers were put on