LITTLE ROCK — The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District and the teachers association on Wednesday night declared an impasse at the end of a day-long, sometimes stormy, court-ordered mediation session meant to resolve a teacher contract.
The failure to reach any agreement on a new teacher contract or on revisions to the existing contract comes two weeks before most teachers report to work and three weeks before the Aug. 19 start of classes for students in the state’s third-largest school district of more than 17,000 students.
Representatives of the two sides in the 8-month-old battle over the district’s effort to sever ties with the teachers’ union on Wednesday night agreed that the news of the impasse will be delivered to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox, who ordered the talks.
But they otherwise interpreted the impasse to have different consequences.
Clayton Blackstock, an attorney for the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers, said the terms and conditions of the contract that was in effect this past school year will remain in effect for this coming school year.
“This is it,” Blackstock said as he held up the 151-page yellow contract book that is also referred to as the Professional Negotiations Agreement for 2006-09.
But School Board member Charlie Wood of Sherwood, along with attorneys Lyle Zuckerman and Keith Billingsley, who represent the district, said exhaustion of the mediation effort means the School Board will make the final decision - likely with advice from the newly constituted Personnel Policies Committee of teachers and administrators - on contract terms for the district’s 1,200 teachers.
“The next step after an impasse is declared is that the board gets to vote on a new contract,” Wood said.
“Even the yellow book says that when you go through the whole process and there is no agreement, then the board has the final say on what to put in place. The beautiful thing about this contract is that if you never can agree, the board gets to decide.”
A total of 25 people - seven School Board members, six teacher association officers,six members of the Personnel Policies Committee, three lawyers, a superintendent and both a state and a federal mediator - convened about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday in the library at Daisy Bates Elementary School in the southeast section of Pulaski County.
They met in response to Fox’s July 12 order in which he determined that the district had not met the requirements to withdraw recognition of the union and that the existing professional negotiations agreement or teacher contract “remains in effect between the parties.”
But Fox also said that judges are to encourage settlements of cases pending before them.
To that end, he ordered the board, the association officers and the Personnel Policies Committee members to schedule and complete mediation within three weeks of his order to finalize the terms and conditions of the teacher contract for the new 2010-11 school year.
Among those terms that are in dispute are the starting and dismissal times for schools this year. The district has announced plans to extend the school day for elementary pupils by 40 minutes this year as a way to incorporate teacher planning time into the day.
That is different than what is in the existing teacher contract where the planning time is either before or after the pupil class day.
Because meetings of the School Board by law must be conducted in public and because mediation sessions are typically done in private, Zuckerman opened the day long meeting by saying that the parties were entering “uncharted territory.”
In general, proposals by either the district or the teacher association were made and discussed briefly in public.
Then the association officers would caucus in one room and district representatives - Superintendent Charles Hopson, Wood, Billingsley and Zuckerman - met in another room.
Mediators Barry Strange and Mark Martin shuttled between the two rooms in an effort to push for common ground.
The session got off to a rocky start when the association called for a 2 percent pay raise and the enactment of tentative agreements that were negotiated last December by representatives of the district and association.
Zuckerman said that the board rejected those tentative agreements last spring. He proposed that the talks center on two issues - ending union recognition, and the differences between the existing contract and the personnel policies that were approved by the School Board in June to be the foundation of a new teachers contract.
“I want to get to the meat and heart of it,” Zuckerman said in a call to debate “substantive issues,” including the district’s policy on accrued days of leave for teachers. “I don’t want to negotiate the size of the table.”
The contract provisions on teacher leave have been a particular concern to Wood, who said that 105 district teachers took 30 or more days of leave last year, which he thought was too much.
Board member Gwen Williams said that a 6-year-old could understand the judge’s order that the existing contract is in effect and that the personnel policies are not legally binding.
“These in my opinion are worthless,” Williams said, adding that she was inclined to go home and risk being sent to jail for violating the judge’s order to participate in the mediation.
“I don’t have time to sit here,” she said.
That prompted board President Tim Clark to ask the mediators to take steps to expedite the pace of the talks.
“This can’t be a waste of time,” he said at 1:45 p.m. “It’s got to be productive.”
At 5 p.m. Zuckerman handed out a proposal calling for the board to recognize the association for the limited purpose of negotiating policies, salaries and educational matters for a “successor agreement” to the existing teacher contract. The proposal also called for the board’s recognition of the association to end at 12:01 a.m. of the day after the board and association’s ratification of the successor agreement.
And the proposal called forthe board-approved personnel policies to be incorporated into the successor agreement.
After a break and some caucus meetings, Blackstock, a lawyer for the association, announced that the association was rejecting the district’s proposal and that it was countering with a proposal that the existing contract that was used this past year serve as the successor agreement with no revisions for 2010-11.
Blackstock said that had the association known the immediate withdrawal of union recognition was an essential term for the district in the mediation, “we wouldn’t be here.”
Zuckerman said the issue of ending union recognition had been on the table since early morning and he questioned whether the association had negotiated in good faith. He invited the association to offer a counter proposal ending union recognition at a different point in the coming school year.
Blackstock said the district’s proposal to discontinue recognizing the union for any purpose during the course of this year “guts the existing contract,” including the association’s obligation to represent teachers in grievances and otherwise enforce the terms of the contract.
Zuckerman said the personnel policies would enable teachers to be represented by a person of their choice in grievances. Blackstock said that is less than what the current contract provides. At that point, Blackstock and Zuckerman agreed that they were at an impasse.
“We thought there were changes that ought to be made,” Blackstock said in an interview after the impasse was declared.
“They thought there should be changes made, but ultimately what they wanted was not to recognize PACT [the teachers association] for any reason ... and they were unwilling to change their position on that even if it meant that we couldn’t change the provisions in this document that needed to be changed for this school year.”
Billingsley said that the district is “plugging ahead” with plans for operating without a union-negotiated contract. He noted that teachers have elected members to the new Personnel Policies Committee and that the committee on Wednesday selected its officers in preparation for reviewing and responding to personnel policies.
He said that while the existing contract does include language that sets out steps for resolving an impasse, he didn’t believe those provisions would be exercised.
“It is our position that Judge Fox has ordered mediation twice ... that supplants the fact finding [provisions],” Billingsley said. “I think we will be back in front of his honor rather quickly.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/29/2010