PORTLAND, Ore. — Monday afternoon, officials with Portland Public Schools announced that the district's bargaining team has sent the Portland Association of Teachers a counter-proposal for the union's review and consideration. This latest update comes after marathon bargaining sessions, and hope from both sides that they're nearing a deal.
Earlier Monday, the Portland Association of Teachers accused the school board of rejecting a tentative agreement that would have ended the teachers strike, but during a news conference, Portland Public Schools officials disagreed with that claim, saying that while the two sides are "very close" to a deal, there was no tentative agreement in place.
PAT officials said the union and bargaining team for PPS agreed on a recommended settlement after 24 hours of bargaining and presented it to school board Monday morning, but it was "unanimously" rejected by board members.
"They are the reason kids will not be returning to schools immediately," said Melissa Ortiz, a fifth-grade teacher and PAT member.
The president of the PAT said the scuttled deal shows a lack of leadership from PPS.
"We have a transformational deal between the PAT and PPS bargaining team, where both sides moved towards shared goals bringing improvements to Portland schools," said PAT president Angela Bonilla. "That the PPS school board yanked this deal out from under us, and extended the strike, displays an unprecedented failure of leadership."
But PPS officials pushed back during Monday morning's news conference, saying there was no tentative agreement, only a "conceptual proposal" that was presented to three board members at the bargaining table. While the proposal had many things the two sides agreed on, a district spokesperson said some fundamental issues remain that still need to be worked out.
"I want to be clear that our board did not reject a proposal, and there was not a tentative agreement in place," said School Board Chair Gary Hollins.
According to the district, the core obstacle to arriving at a deal concerned student privacy.
Board of Education Director Julia Brim-Edwards said part of the proposal was the formation of a class-size committee that would give parents the opportunity to weigh in on whether to admit a new student to a class already at the threshold for classroom size.
The district was concerned about parents on that committee being given access to information about the student, which could include mental health issues and other private information, Brim-Edwards said. The district said that level of decision-making and sharing of private student information should be handled at the school level: by teachers, the principal and school administrators.
"We're not comfortable with parents making [educational] decisions for other people's children," Brim-Edwards said. "We really feel that's a responsibility of the principal. The committee would be the principal, another administrator and two teachers. We feel that's the right level of decision-making."
Though the issue of private student information in the hands of parents is the "core obstacle to arriving at a conceptual agreement," Brim-Edwards said the board members discussed two other items of concern when the proposal was presented to them by the district's bargaining team.
The second concern was over a re-entry plan for students. She said the district feels "very strongly" that students should have all instructional days made up. The third concern, she said, was the cost of the proposal. She said the two sides agreed to cost-of-living adjustments for teachers of 6.25% in the first year, followed by 4% in the second year and 3% in the third year. PPS said that would mean over half of educators would have earned over $100,000 per year by the third year of the contract. Brim-Edwards said that would require the district to make about $120 million in cuts.
"There are still some outstanding issues we want to talk about," Brim-Edwards said. "But we feel a deal is very close still."
Brim-Edwards wouldn't put an exact timetable on when a deal will be reached, but said "we feel like we're very, very close" and that they were going right back in after the news conference to continue bargaining.
PPS teachers have been on strike for three weeks amid an ongoing contract dispute over issues of pay, class sizes and planning time. The teachers strike began Nov. 1 and so far, students have missed 10 days of classroom instruction. Last week, PPS said the soonest students could return to class would be Monday, Nov. 27, after the Thanksgiving holiday break.
Last week, the union struck class-size caps from its proposal, replacing it with a large increase in overage pay for teachers who exceed certain thresholds in class size or caseload. The district said the overage pay increase was not a viable alternative because it was still too expensive.
On Monday, Brim-Edwards said that increase in overage pay was not in Monday's proposal. "We went back to the current status. That's an issue that has been resolved," she said.
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