Negotiating teams representing the Little Rock School District and district custodians will return to contract negotiations after the School Board rejected a tentative agreement reached earlier in the school year.
The board voted 5-2 against the proposal Thursday. The return to the bargaining table shouldn't have an immediate financial effect on the custodians. The employees already received the same 3 percent across-the-board pay raise extended to other district employees for the school fiscal year ending Monday.
The board also voted to give the custodians two personal leave days for the 2014-15 school year that they would have received had the proposed contract been ratified.
The board and the Little Rock Education Association, which is the union contract bargaining agent for the custodians as well as other employee groups, have been debating the proposed contract since April. The custodians ratified the tentative agreement in March.
The board initially held off approving it because Superintendent Dexter Suggs and his staff said typos needed to be corrected. Later, attorneys for the school district identified substantive issues in the agreement that they said were concerns.
The board sought to have the attorneys for the district and the association meet to resolve those issues. The association refused, saying that the board should vote on the same tentative agreement that was negotiated by the district's team and approved by the custodians, and that any attorney involvement should have occurred before the teams signed off on the proposal. Association leaders said negotiations could only reopen if the board rejected the proposed contract.
Teresa Knapp Gordon, Little Rock Education Association vice president, compared the situation with that of selling a house only to have the buyer arrive at the sale closing with additional demands for the seller. She told the board that bad-faith negotiations create a lack of trust in any effort to reach a new agreement.
Khayyam Eddings, an attorney for the district, recommended that the board reject the proposed agreement as written because one or more of its terms are inconsistent with state law.
He cited as an example a provision in the contract regarding the scheduling of employee grievance hearings that differs from language in the Public School Fair Hearing Act.
The act states that a hearing shall take place in no fewer than five days and no more than 10 days after the written request has been received by the superintendent, unless the employee and school board agree in writing to an earlier or later hearing date.
The tentative agreement said a board hearing shall be set within 30 days of the request in cases of a suspension or termination recommendation.
Board member Tara Shephard said she couldn't approve the tentative agreement with conflicting language. She noted that earlier in the week, in a hearing for displaced administrators, the board faced the very issue of deciding whether scheduling deadlines for a hearing were violated.
Board member Norma Johnson said she couldn't approve "a dysfunctional document" because it will create more problems.
"I'm not disrespecting anybody," she said.
Board member Dianne Curry said she was disappointed with the whole custodian contract process. The district must find a way to operate in good faith, she said, adding that district administrators must bring "quality products" to the board. She also said she wasn't convinced that the tentative agreement violated any state laws.
Board members voting for the motion to reject the proposed contract were Shephard, Johnson, Leslie Fisken, Jody Carreiro and Greg Adams. Curry and C.E. McAdoo voted against the motion.
The vote on the motion to award two personal leave days to the custodians was identical.
The board unanimously approved a motion made by McAdoo that will, hereafter, require a summary report to be written after each contract negotiating session and that the report be distributed to the board and school district attorneys.
"We got ourselves into this situation because we did not know," McAdoo said about the custodians' contract. "And we did not know because we did not ask."
The summary reports will prevent that and will enable the attorneys to identify potential problems early on, he said.
The superintendent supported the proposal and added that he plans to make an attorney a member of the district's team in future employee contract negotiations.
"If we don't, we are going to be cleaning up stuff like this for quite sometime," Suggs said. "It's best to get it right on the front end."
Metro on 06/28/2014