Today, we had our tenth mediation session with SPPS. The district made very little movement in their proposals throughout the day, but we had small group discussions with district administration about ECFE, licensed staff loss of preparation time pay, counselors as substitutes, and new employee onboarding.
While we received nine counters from SPPS, six of them were a restatement of their original or previous proposals, showing no movement toward a compromise. The district is continuing to say NO to providing EAs with additional technology to perform their jobs and they rejected our last counter on pay for EAs who have their hours reduced on caucus and election days. SPPS dropped their ECFE planning time proposal after a long discussion. We are currently considering the district’s counter proposals about SCSP vacation time and Adult Basic Education.
Your SPFE bargaining team proposed dropping the SPFE proposals for new employee onboarding and building substitutes, if the district will drop their proposals for married health insurance benefit and recess. If the district agrees, dropping these proposals would allow us to maintain the current recess and building substitute language as well as the married health insurance benefit in our contract.
We still have no agreements on class size or student mental health support language. The district has not moved off of their “parameters” of a 1.5% wage increase with no other benefit increases.
We scheduled a number of additional sessions for the coming weeks. Our next two mediation dates are Friday Feb 25th and Monday Feb 28th.