Tacoma teachers ratify the new contract.
The final vote was 1,683 YES, 15 NO and three invalid ballots. Classes will resume Friday throughout the Tacoma School District.
Tacoma teachers said the contract is a huge victory for them and their students. School district administrators and the Tacoma School Board proposed increasing class sizes, cutting teacher pay and imposing subjective and potentially discriminatory policies regarding teacher staffing decisions. Unwilling to continue working under an expired contract, and refusing to concede on those issues, 87 percent of Tacoma teachers voted to strike Sept. 12.
…
Here are the highlights of the new contract:
- Protects existing class-size/caseload limits for all TEA certificated members
- Protects existing salary scheduling; one less building optional day
- Protects current displacement language for this year; committee with equal representation from TEA and administration will study and implement new policy using objective and appropriate criteria in the 2012-13 school year. Any new policy must be approved by two-thirds of the committee members.
Kudos to governor Gregoire for bringing both sides to Olympia to hammer something out. Still, I imagine that the special session if it happens and the next regular session of the legislature are going to have a lot to do with if there are future strikes. If we get even more cuts, there will probably be more strikes as the issues will be tougher to negotiate.
Where’s the 9/22 open thread?
So, score another one for collective bargaining and engaged Democratic governors?
When I heard this morning that a tentative agreement had been reached, all I could think about were those who were yapping about firing the teachers and berating the governor for being ineffective.
Yes or No and there are three invalid ballots?
Thats fucking awesome. I only wonder if there
were chads.
@3 Speaking of ballots, the REPUBLICAN Secretary of State in Colorado is SUING the city of Denver for mailing ballots to REGISTERED VOTERS!!! That kind of tells you what the GOP attitude toward voting is.
http://www.kdvr.com/news/polit.....6610.story
Get this:
“DENVER — Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler, who Democrats have accused of trying to purge minorities from the state’s voter rolls, filed suit Wednesday against the city of Denver for its plan to mail ballots to all registered voters.”
Speaks for itself, doesn’t it??
P R I C E L E S S !
Oh… Mark has it covered!
# 4: So, the Secty of State’s office defines “active” voters as those who voted in the 2010 elections. Anybody who missed that election is “inactive”, and has to go through a process to re-activate their registration.
That’s one of the more restrive definitions of “active/inactive” voters I’ve ever heard. And it’s a rather convenient one for the Republicans, given that the 2010 elections featured unusually large turnouts of Republicans, but Democratic turnout was down.
It’s also convenient for Republicans that the definition tends to disproportionately dis-enfranchise minority voters. Which may make the entire classification system (active vs. inactive) an illegal “caging” attempt.
# 5: Laugh all you want, but those “invalid ballots” were probably symbolic protests against what was clearly a pre-ordained conclusion – either by writing “none of the above”, or placing an “X” across the entire ballot, etc. Wherever paper ballots are used, there always a few of those because people aren’t happy with the choices available to them. Absent any other info, I would think that would be the most likely reason.
So your attempts to infer anything else is, in itself, laughable.
The teachers should have held their strike in July so as to not interfere with the school year.
From 7:
“…people aren’t happy with the choices available to them.”
That pretty much sums up the choices we’ve had for the past 30 years!
# 8: I assume you meant that as a joke.
Continuation of # 10:
If not a joke, then I would point out that businesses should only lay off workers during their normal off-hours, so it doesn’t impact their work duties or their pay or benefits.
@11 Teacher strikes are illegal.