The Negotiations Team has been hard at work. On October. 10, the BTA Representative Council met and determined that in addition to the articles opened by mutual consent (as discussed in last month’s Negotiation News), we will be opening Article 14, Transfer and Reassignment. We have met with the district and set negotiation dates.
We have agreed by side letter of agreement, to the distribution of awards money (II/USP Schools) in the following manner: Each certificated person working at that site in the year the award was earned (1999-2000), will receive their award as granted by the state, based on full time position (FTE) or portion thereof. This may sound like a no-brainer, but there was a provision in the original law which allowed for a different distribution, if we did not negotiate it. The district should be receiving these funds on or about November 8 and will distribute them directly.
In the meantime, we have been meeting to continue our work on the Evaluations Article. The Evaluations Committee is a Joint Committee that is a sub-committee of the Negotiations Team. The Association’s members are: Brad Frank, Lee Edwards, Jill Sullivan, Denise Jennex, and myself. The district’s members are: Sue Holliday, Bruce Osgood, Emilio Urioste, Nancy Gascich, and Greg Bowman. As you know, we are revising the evaluation article for implementation NEXT YEAR, and this year’s evaluations are conducted according to our current contract.
This revision was driven by changes in legislation and Ed. Code. The PAR legislation requires that we have “Unsatisfactory” as a trigger to entrance into the PAR program. Ed. Code requires that we be evaluated on California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTP). You will be hearing a great deal about these standards in the future, and they are presented in their entirety on the page following this article.
We have developed a “working copy” of a STULL form for teachers not in a traditional classroom situation. We will be holding open meetings to allow members interested/affected by this form to give input into its final construction on Monday, November 26 at 6:00 p.m. and on Tuesday, November 27 at 3:15 p.m. in room 20 at Roosevelt Elementary. Unit members that will be evaluated using this document are: Curriculum Specialists, Literacy Teachers, ELD Specialists, Children’s Center teachers, Nurses, Speech Pathologists, Library Media Resource Teachers, Counselors, and Teachers on Special Assignment. This document will also be presented at the regular monthly meetings of nurses, counselors, and speech pathologists. I strongly encourage any member who falls into one of these categories to plan to attend one of these meetings and put in your two cents towards its final construction. Please mark your calendar.
We are currently working on new forms for classroom teachers in a traditional setting, and we will schedule meetings for its review and comments when we have a working copy, which we anticipate will be early in January. Look for information regarding our progress in next month’s issue.