Professional Development Proposal

RGNEA Membership,
The RGNEA negotiation team has been made an offer on the Monday Professional Development Issue. We are bringing it back for the approval or denial of our membership. The proposed agreement is as follows:
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The number of Professional Development meetings during non-contractual time will be 18. (That number is down from 23 meetings that was last approved by the Board of Education)
The length of time of each meeting can be a maximum of 60 minutes.(The amount of time is down from 90 minutes)
The meeting time begins no later than 30 minutes after the school dismissal time.
The Professional Development does not need to necessarily be on Monday, but could be on other days.
The Building Level Professional Development Committee will approve all PD activities for the building and monitor each activity.
As per the PD agreement already in place from past years, all mandatory meetings shall be advertised 3 days prior to the event.
There will be evaluation forms distributed by the building PDC and turned back into the PDC after the completion of the form.
In addition, the administration will decrease the contracted time required for the teacher by 15 minutes each day from the acceptance of this agreement to the end of the year. This means that a schedule will need to be made at the building level to allow every teacher to shorten the required work time by 15 minutes allowing every teacher to come to work later or leave work earlier. This time would be during the current required 30 minutes before the school start time or the required 30 minutes after school dismissal time. The 15 minutes could be given at the beginning of the day (arrive 15 minutes before the school start time instead of 30 minutes) or at the end of the day(allowing teachers to leave 15 minutes after dismissal time) or workout a combination of minutes before and after school which add up to 15 minutes. These 15 minutes will not effect student educational time, just potentially the teacher duty schedule. For those teachers that are currently required to serve duty during these times, the liability of scheduling and covering those duties falls on the administration in the building to cover any time that goes beyond the new, adjusted, time requirements in place for the teacher. Certainly, adjusting times should be a collaborative effort between the teacher and administrator, but the principal has the ability to place the teacher's 15 minutes leave time before or after school where it will least affect student coverage needs.
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Your negotiation team has worked extremely hard to work out a compromise. In previous negotiation sessions, we have asked for a reduction to 10 Professional Development meetings per year. We have not budged on that number until this new proposal has been offered.We know even 10 would be more than any other district requiring teachers to work on non-contracted time. Are we satisfied? We think this may be all we can get on this issue for this school year. I know this is not what we wanted, but it is a slight movement in the issue which we have not had in previous years. This plan has its flaws. Many teachers respect their principals and don't want to put the building principal in a spot to decrease the coverage of building duties while the students are there. Remember, this is an administrative proposal that we are bringing back. This proposal is setting a framework for the few administrators that abuse the teacher's rights when it comes to duties and the PD piece. What you currently have in place in your building may not even be affected by this.So, your approval of this proposal would mean a cut of 15 minutes per day from your schedule over an estimated 140-160 work days. That adds up to 2100 minutes or more over the rest of the school year. We would now be involved in professional development for 18 meetings at 60 minutes and that adds up to a maximum of 1080 minutes. So the compromise does give us back more non-contractual time to the teachers in return for the Quality Professional Development at the 18 scheduled meetings. If this is approved, the Professional Development activities WILL now go through the Professional Development Committee in the building. The principal is a member of that committee, but does not hold a voting chair on the committee. All future PD activities must be approved by this committee. Hopefully your building has elected members to the building level Professional Development Committee that will represent the entire staff and the PD needs when building PD is suggested. The building level PDC will have the ability to turn down PD activities that are not quality activities for the entire staff or for selected groups of staff members. It should be your peers voting on the PD activities instead of the administrator dictating what PD should take place. A principal dictating what PD takes place will now be at an end. Teachers will no longer be expected to sit through Professional Development that does not pertain to their subject or needs. If the subject is reading, the P.E. teacher will not be required to sit through it just so the administration can say they had PD training. The secretary of the PDC committee is charged with recording the number of meeting days and the time of the meeting. There should also be a PDC group grievance for every PD meeting held that was not approved by this committee or does not conform to the rules set up by this agreement. As usual, if there are any problems in regard to the administration in following the agreement, we will be there for you. Contact Gilbert or I to initiate any grievance for your building. We'll keep you informed and ask you to stand behind what your negotiation team is accomplishing for the membership. We, as your negotiation team, are recommending the acceptance of this agreement on the Professional Development portion of the contract. We GUARANTEE when we go back to the negotiation table in January for the next contract year, our goal is to get most of the Professional Development placed on Professional Development Days on contractual days and less of the after school, non-contractual meeting times. I hope I have cleared up every question you may have in regard to the proposal and the effects of the proposal on our job for now and in the future. If there are any further questions, feel free to call me or talk to any of the negotiation committee. Their names are included below.
Your current negotiation team is:
David Jennerjohn - Negotiation Chair (Meadows)
Theresa Beck - Lead Facilitator (Meadows)
Jennifer Joachimstaler - Secretary (Glasgow)
Matt Williams (Highland)
Joda Fogerson (Lemasters)
Alice Webb (High School)
Richard Thies (Highland, Lewis & Clark, Gibson)
Gilbert Balderrama (MNEA UniServ Director)

Thanks again for your continued support.
Richard Thies
RGNEA President

Membership Info

Attention Members and Building Reps.

Lisa Vitale needs your membership information as soon as possible. If you haven't gotten your membership information signed and turned into your building representative, please do so immediately. If you haven't received your membership information yet, check with
your building rep. today. Building Reps. as soon as you have all of your info please get it to Lisa. It is all due to the MNEA office for processing by the end of the week. Lisa is working under that MNEA office deadline and she needs time to compile that information before delivering.

Hope everyone had a relaxing holiday.
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