Your bargaining team met with our counterparts from the District for face-to-face mediation yesterday. We were happy to have our new Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero at the table for the first time, in addition to Kylie Rogers, Chief Human Resources Officer. 

At the outset of the meeting, your bargaining chair Steve Lancaster said he expected this meeting to be a breakthrough or a breakdown. By the end of the evening he concluded it was neither.

Download a PDF of the Bargaining Brief

Future Mediation Dates

There are several bargaining dates scheduled in November. We have agreed to three mediation dates on November 2^nd, 15^th, and 16^th. In addition, we have scheduled multiple small group meetings between HR representatives and PAT staff to work on the mechanics of the proposals. We should have a good idea by November 17^th whether we are making progress towards a settlement.

PPS Continues to Submit Incomplete and Inaccurate Bargaining Proposals

After months of exchanging bargaining proposals, Laird Cusack, the PPS bargaining chair, continues to submit inaccurate and incomplete bargaining proposals. The PPS proposals do not consistently employ standard contract writing processes which would show when current contract language is deleted or when new language is added. Therefore, your PAT team has been forced to review every word submitted in each PPS proposal. We have found random words missing inside paragraphs of contract language that are not being amended or discussed. We have also found whole sections of the current contract that simply disappeared without any notation that the language was eliminated. Additionally, PPS has failed to track past interest based bargaining consensus agreements and include them in the PPS proposals. Finally, PPS routinely deletes its past proposals including areas where we have moved to agreement. Laird routinely has failed to remember past conversations and proposals that have resolved certain portions of the contract. This forces PAT to research the bargaining history around these lost agreements and/or restart the conversations that led to the original solutions. All of this has stalled the bargaining process.

Today your Bargaining Team met with the district for our fourth day of mediation since the district ended the IBB process.

At the end of the day, we are wondering, did we take steps forward, or just fewer steps backward than we have become accustomed to?

Your bargaining team finally met with our counterparts from the District for face-to-face mediation today.

Tuesday evening at 9:14 PM, PPS emailed a proposal to your PAT bargaining team.  After a review of the document on Wednesday, we realized that there were:

• Brand-new proposals, despite being long-past the deadline for new issues;
• Proposals that altered or removed already agreed upon items;
• Proposals which were so poorly written that we could not determine their meaning;

Your team found it offensive that we received this incomplete, inaccurate, and sloppy document after hundreds of hours in negotiations. Both sides were slated to meet for mediation today, but we worked separately the entire day. The state mediator presented our feelings and our written summary of some of the problems in their document to the PPS team. After that, PPS spent the rest of the day working on correcting/altering their careless work.

Your PAT bargaining team met with the district’s bargaining team today for our first mediation session. Although we were in session for more than twelve hours, we were unable to make any tangible progress.