LNEA's negotiations with the district have hit a wall since the district continues to insist it cannot afford raises to reward returning teachers for their year of service (otherwise known as step movement on the salary schedule).
In the negotiations meeting Monday evening, the district offered lateral movement without this vertical step movement. As a result of KNEA’s budget analysis, however, we continue to believe that the BOE will find a way to pay teachers raises based on the salary schedule. Their representatives say that this year raises will depend entirely on the superintendents of the other districts in the special education co-operative. Leavenworth, as the sponsoring district, has always held the purse strings for the co-op.
Being "at impasse" means notice will be filed with the Kansas Department of Labor. This means we will be meeting with a mediator from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. We are hopeful that this process will begin without any further delay. We have one team member who has been through this process before. Assuming things work similarly now, the mediator will hold one marathon session behind closed doors during which the mediator tries to bring the two parties together. If mediation fails, we then go to fact-finding, a process where a third party examines all the facts, including budget, and then makes a recommendation. The recommendation will be made public, however, the district is not legally obligated to follow it.
LNEA is certainly willing to continue discussions with the Board's representatives. In fact, we scheduled another meeting for December 17; however, the Board's lead negotiator, attorney Robert Hingula, stated that he doubted the need for meetings between his team and LNEA once impasse papers have been filed.
However, Kansas statute says explicitly that nothing in the law should be construed so as to prevent the parties from voluntarily engaging in professional negotiation during impasse.
In the meantime, we will continue working under the current contract until this is settled, and we cannot guarantee that any pay raises we do negotiate will be retroactive to the beginning of the year.
We will be compiling some information to help you understand this process and communicate about it effectively, and will share that with you as soon as it is available. In the meantime, if you are interested in hearing more about the budget and the co-op, the last board meeting is at
http://vimeo.com/80271505. At the 2:13 mark, the district’s chief financial officer begins to address the board about the co-op budget and later about the future of the co-op itself. At least one statement here is incorrect. The agreement of all districts in the co-op is not required in order to dissolve the cooperative.
For your information, the board has scheduled two special meetings this Wednesday evening, one at 6 p.m. and one at 8 p.m. The agenda for the first meeting is at
http://www.boarddocs.com/ks/usd453/Board.nsf/Public. The agenda for the second should appear there soon. It lists only two executive sessions, one for consultation with their attorney and one for discussing negotiations. They have also scheduled a meeting of a board finance committee and invited three teachers to participate. That meeting is on Thursday afternoon. Its primary goal is to identify ways the district can trim its budget to meet the demands of the Affordable Care Act in 2014-15, and therefore will affect future negotiations. If you have questions you think our representatives on that committee should ask, or if you have suggestions about where the district and/or the co-op could save money while maintaining quality education for its students, please send them to
lneanews@gmail.com.
Your negotiations team,
Ginger Riddle, Dennis Dickson, Michelle Smalls, Kay Smith, Bryan Walker, Robin Crim and Ruth Striggow