Hello Educator,
Today your PAT bargaining team met with PPS administrators and shared PAT's vision for great public schools.
Our comprehensive package of proposals reflect the priorities you’ve shared over the past few months, through bargaining surveys, listening sessions, and school site meetings, including:
- Smaller Class Sizes and Caseloads, With Hard Caps
- Safe and Healthy Schools
- Racial Equity and Restorative Justice
- Competitive Salaries and Benefits
- Expanded Early Learning and Preschool
- More Teaching, Less Testing
- Additional Special Education Services
- Expanded Mental Health Services
- Housing Assistance for At-Risk Families
- Real Community Connections
We encourage you to review our bargaining platform, watch our video about the proposals (language starts at 5:23), the slideshow with the proposals and sign the petition supporting these demands. For those who want to dive deeper, you can review our comprehensive package of proposals online.
We know the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Our students and communities are grappling with more urgent, unmet needs than ever. We can’t simply go back to the way schools were before the pandemic because, as educators know firsthand, the status quo over the past two decades has severely short changed our students and we cannot allow current conditions to stand.
Our bargaining proposals address these skyrocketing needs of our students in a number of areas, including mental health, special education, housing, and racial equity. We know what it will take for public schools to become an anchor for safe, stable, and equitable communities, and our proposals lay that foundation.
These proposals also address what it will take to recruit and retain great educators. Our profession is already undercompensated. Without cost of living adjustments that are at least equal to inflation, professional educators will fall even further behind.
Our proposals will ensure educators have enough time to do their job, with more time to plan, grade, communicate and collaborate with meaningful increases in educator directed time to support students.
Finally, our proposals call for hard caps to class size/case load to ensure that educators are able to give students the individual attention they need and deserve.
As we come out of the turbulence of the last three years, there is an understandable desire to return to normal, but the old normal wasn’t working. The new normal we are living now absolutely cannot be allowed to stand.
We have to change the conversation, and our bargaining proposals reflect this goal. Our proposal is without question ambitious, but our students deserve nothing less.
In Solidarity,
PAT Bargaining Team
Steve Lancaster, Chair
Francisca Alvarez
Samara Bockleman
Julia Fogg
Thea Keith
Charity Powell
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