Patience is taught in kindergarten, but it’s coming in handy at all ages.
Battle Ground teachers have been working without a contract since Sept. 1, and there is no end in sight as negotiations with the school district continue.
“You hold on to the hope that your employer will honor what the teachers have asked for,” said Battle Ground Education Association President Linda Peterson. “But it is a back-and-forth process.”
The association, which represents more than 825 teachers, started negotiating with the district in May and last month brought in a mediator from the state Public Employment Relations Commission.
The district made its latest offer Nov. 5 following three mediated bargaining sessions and more than a dozen previous meetings.
“There is no question that the overall compensation that our teachers receive is less than some of our neighboring districts, and yes they would like us to move closer to being comparable to those districts,” Battle Ground Public Schools Superintendent Mark Hottowe said.
However, details of the latest proposed contract were unavailable because of a confidentiality agreement, and neither side was forthcoming with the status of negotiations.
“At this time we’re not able to talk specifics about what the offer was, but only that we’ve made what we think is a fair offer,” said Hottowe, who started with the 13,000-student district in 2014.
A three-year contract expired at the start of the school year, though teachers continue to work while a new contract is getting hammered out.
Peterson wrote in an October BGEA newsletter that the union is “negotiating a new way with a superintendent of 15 months.”
“We recognized his potential to be a great superintendent,” she wrote. “As we move forward, we ask him to fairly compensate his employees.”
BGEA member surveys early this year showed that compensation, workload, class size and professional-development money were priorities to bring into negotiations, according to the union’s website.
Charts comparing compensation among neighboring districts have been circulated by the BGEA, and they show Battle Ground teachers lagging behind districts in several categories, especially professional-development money. Such payments are used for mandatory continued education.
“The educators in Battle Ground deserved to be part of the district budget,” Peterson wrote on the BGEA Facebook page. “We deserved to be considered a priority when determining where the dollars were spent.”
At the very least, both sides can agree on the need to reach an agreement and soon.
“It’s our hope we will continue to meet and work toward a center and get to a point in the near future where we get a tentative agreement and put this work behind us and concentrate on the work of helping kids to learn,” Hottowe said.
Peterson agreed.
“The bottom line on any of this is what is best for our students,” she said.
