PAT and PPS bargained Wednesday, September 23rd from about 12:15 until 3:15; you may view the sessions here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Our discussion focused almost entirely on evaluations of professional educators during CDL.
Although there were some areas of agreement, the two sides were unable to reach agreement. PPS agreed with PAT that educators primarily need support during CDL, but they asserted that the District must retain the right to non-extend or non-renew an educator based on distance learning evaluations. Astoundingly, they recognize that no one in the district, including administrators, is fully experienced in distance online learning, and yet the PPS bargaining team insisted on having the ability to remove a teacher from teaching because of unsatisfactory performance teaching students during CDL.
The right and requirement to evaluate educators is part of Oregon state law, but the moments of a tone deaf approach by the PPS district-administrators was surprising.
The two teams agreed in concept to form a committee whose responsibility is to modify the existing evaluation rubric so that it is applicable to distance learning. The committee will have equal numbers of PAT-appointed members and District management, and the District wants the committee to complete its task by October 26th. According to the District, if the committee can’t complete the job by the 26th, PPS administrators will be able to evaluate educators using the existing rubric. The District is adamant about this even though they have admitted that the rubric is unsuited to current teaching and learning conditions. Your PAT team totally rejects that position and will continue to fight to achieve humane and sensible evaluation language.
Until we have a complete agreement on the topic, PAT professional educators may have administrators do drop-in observations, but no educator should have a formal observation conducted.
Your PAT team meets with the District again on September 28th from noon until 4 to continue negotiations.
In Solidarity,
Your PAT Bargaining Team-
Steve Lancaster, Chair
Emy Markewitz
Francisca Alvarez
Charity Powell
Andre Hawkins
