PAT Colleagues:

We have some progress in bargaining to report.  PAT and PPS bargaining teams met on October 2nd and again on October 9th.  (The October 2nd meeting can be viewed here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. The October 9th meeting can be viewed here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)  The result of those sessions are a number of agreements on working conditions.

The first set of agreements cover evaluations.  Starting now:

• All goal setting is pushed back to November 1st, and the goals are to be SEL goals rather than academic goals.
• No educator is to be negatively rated or impacted if they are not able to achieve the SEL goal.  No observation is to take place prior to November 1st. 
• All probationary educators, regardless of their year in the probationary process, will follow the timelines for probationary 3 educators. 

We finally agreed to form a committee to modify the existing educator rubric so that the rubric identifies and encourages proficient and distinguished practice, and which recognizes that educators need support rather than unsatisfactory ratings on an evaluation. 

Last but not least, any educator on a Plan of Assistance (POA) that began prior to the COVID shutdown, or who was to be put on a POA, will have the plan restarted only after the PAT and PPS meet to agree which ones are appropriate to continue prior to full in-person education resuming. 

In a major workload improvement for some PAT members, the two sides agreed to 1.0 FTE Technical Assistant professional educators for both School Psychologists and SLPs. 

Although we did not reach agreement, your PAT team was able to make progress on fair working conditions for .5 FTE educators, and for terms related to providing services to students by Social Workers, Counselors, School Psychologists, Speech Language Pathologists, and QMHPs.  

We meet again on October 16th to discuss part-time work conditions in addition to other PAT proposals.

In Solidarity,

Your PAT Bargaining Team-

Steve Lancaster, Chair

Emy Markewitz

Francisca Alvarez

Charity Powell

Andre Hawkins

Portland Association of Teachers