PAT Colleagues:
Today, your PAT Bargaining Team met with the District to begin bargaining our Memorandum of Agreement on safely returning to work.
At this initial meeting, we discussed bargaining ground rules, and our PAT Bargaining Chair, Steve Lancaster, shared this preamble to make PAT’s priorities clear. We exchanged topics, with both sides agreeing that crucial issues to resolve include workday, leaves of absence, building access, and Special Education. Your PAT team also stressed throughout the meeting the importance of better supporting our students and families, including with nutrition, technology, mentoring, engagement, and communications and support in the family’s preferred language.
Notably, both sides agreed to start our negotiation sessions with a focus on Comprehensive Distance Learning (CDL), acknowledging that returning to live instruction is not viable under current conditions.
We made clear that the current level of planning/preparation time is woefully inadequate under normal circumstances, and will need to be dramatically expanded for Distance Learning to be effective. We intend to stress the need for embedded time in every work-day for lesson planning, assessment, student feedback, outreach/communication to families, as well as instruction.
Finally, we indicated that our colleagues in Special Education, School Psychologist, and SLP positions (to name a few) have a “backlog” of work from last year as well as the upcoming year’s new tasks, and that the return to work must take into account those demands.
You can watch recordings of this bargaining session at these two links: Part 1 and Part 2.
Next Steps
We are scheduled to meet with the District team again on July 30th where we expect to address what an educator’s day looks like in a CDL model.
Thank you for your support as we advocate for the needs of our learning community during this ongoing health crisis.
Your PAT Bargaining Team-
Steve Lancaster, Chair
Emy Markewitz
Francisca Alvarez
Charity Powell
Andre Hawkins
Chelyn Joseph
