“This is big”: Negotiators edge closer to agreement
Gaps between two sides grow smaller, but talks go late into the night
Negotiators for Denver Public Schools and the district’s union spent a second day attempting to end the teachers strike, and while they appeared to grow ever closer Wednesday, the bargaining session drifted late into the night with the two sides spending hours apart.
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association’s lead negotiator had signaled hours earlier that he hoped to reach a deal, but, by 10:30 p.m. the two teams had yet to return to the bargaining table.
“This is big,” union negotiator Rob Gould said after DPS presented a new teacher pay proposal around 5:40 p.m. “I just want to say thank you.”
The union returned a little more than an hour later, and gave a quick presentation of its own latest proposal that accepted much of the district’s language. The union brought up a few technical issues it felt hadn’t been worked out yet.
“We want to keep this short because we know the night is short and we need to make decisions about tomorrow,” Gould said, referencing whether teachers will continue a walkout for a fourth day on Thursday. “We see how far you all have moved. In order to get a deal tonight, we are accepting lanes and steps.”
The district said it would take the information under consideration and get to work, with everyone hopeful to wrap things up later Wednesday night.
Denver’s teachers have been on strike since Monday, with more than 2,600 having walked out of the classroom, according to DPS. The union, which has criticized the
district’s reliance on an incentive-based pay system, is attempting to negotiate a new compensation deal that it hopes will provide teachers better and more dependable wage increases over time.
As DPS presented the highlights of the latest changes to the district’s compensation proposal Wednesday, teachers in the audience at the Denver Central Library whooped and cheered.
DPS’s salary schedule now advances educators up a pay scale in increments of 18 credits rather than 20, which the union had asked for, as the course credits teachers can put toward advancement tend to be in groups of three.
Talks moved to the contentious bonuses that have remained a sticking point for both the union and the district. Michelle Berge, DPS’s general counsel, said that bonuses for teachers in hard-to-fill positions and at high-poverty schools would come down to $2,250 from $2,500.
“What we’d like to do is show our commitment to moving more money from incentives into base (pay),” Berge said, eliciting claps from the audience.
Lowering the bonuses would free up an additional $1.5 million to put toward teacher base pay, DPS said.
Both parties agreed that major movement had been made Wednesday toward putting an end to Denver’s first teachers strike since 1994. Gould noted that he wasn’t sure if there was a time cut-off to alert teachers whether the strike still will be happening Thursday, but he would keep everyone updated.
The claps and finger snaps of agreement from Denver teachers proved different from past negotiating sessions, when the typical crowd response to district proposals would often be groans and occasional heckling.
Changes to DPS’s compensation plan presented Wednesday included the ways educators qualify to move up a pay scale throughout their career, and new language that more closely reflected the union’s stance on professional development units, which are free in-district courses offered to advance teachers’ education.
When union officials came back with their counter-proposal in the early afternoon, they had largely accepted the district’s language about the different ways to advance across a salary scale throughout a teacher’s career.
Gould said it was time for the discussion to get at other areas of the ProComp teacher-compensation system so the two parties could try to wrap things up today. The conversation turned to the bonuses for educators working in high-poverty, highpriority schools.
“We want you to know we are open to the incentive because we know it’s important to you,” Gould told district officials. “If we can get the base salary schedule our teachers need.”
Pam Shamburg, a union staffer, noted that the ProComp ballot language — which needs to be honored in order to receive $33 million worth of Denver taxpayers’ money toward teacher pay — doesn’t explicitly mention bonuses. Shamburg said the language suggests supporting teachers in these schools through pay and other methods like policies that decrease class size and increase mental health access.
“It’s a lot of the policies we have in DPS that actually drive people away from these schools,” Gould said.
DPS Superintendent Susana Cordova and the union team had a substantive conversation about ways educators in challenging positions need to be better supported.
The district said it would review the union’s latest proposal, and the conversation ended up on a high note with Gould making note of Cordova’s commitment to collaboration moving forward and Cordova adding that these were the types of productive conversations she finds necessary in the future.
“This is actually the kind of conversation we should be having all the time ...,” Cordova said. ”Truthfully, there is so much we agree on. We’ve got to be able to figure out how we set up the conditions to have this kind of conversation ... and that we’re not just yelling at each other. I don’t want to be the kind of leader of an organization where we can’t create those conditions.”
The dynamic at the bargaining table had been notably different, with less tense back-and-forth critique of each other’s plans and more collaboration and urgency to get down to business.
The bargaining table was empty for much of the day as both teams spent time in private discussion trying to broker a deal.
During a particularly long lull in the downtown library basement, 72-yearold DPS math teacher Kathleen Braun curled up on the floor under her seat for a quick power nap.
The exhaustion of neverending bargaining sessions, picketing and worrying about students was nothing new for Braun, who has now endured three DPS strikes in her lifetime — in 1969, 1994 and this week.