High school teachers, school board to meet

A date has been set for the next round of contract talks between high school teachers, who are in phase one of job action, and the local public school board.
They will meet April 8-9 in an effort to resolve the dispute dating back to last fall. District high school teachers have been in a legal strike position since Feb. 21.
“Basically, we’re trying to work around everyone’s schedules,” said Brian Church of the local Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation’s bargaining unit.
“We’re optimistic, for sure,” he said of working out a deal. “I know we want a deal and I’m sure they want a deal.”
The question is, what will that deal look like?
Dozens of school boards across the province are facing the same situation as the one here. Some are in more advanced stages of job action while some haven’t reached that point yet.
Still others have negotiated one- and two-year deals.
At this point, Church said, many of the deals that have been reached across the province “look better than we’ve been offered.”
“What you want and what you get are not always the same thing,” he admitted. “The more deals that come in, the better because nobody’s going to take a bad deal.”
On the other hand, if other boards reach agreements that don’t look as good as what already has been offered here, then local teachers may have to concede even more.
“We hope we can come to some decision then [at the new round of talks],” said Church. “If not, we may have to move to phase two of job action.”
Church said the parameters of that action are left to the individual districts to decide—and no decision as to what phase two action might look like has been decided yet.
He noted that would depend on how well the talks go and what the atmosphere is like at that time.
“If the talks on [April 8-9] are not productive, there is a possibility we will increase sanctions,” Church warned.
One thing he stressed was that money wasn’t the only thing to be negotiated. Church said the last round of talks broke down before anything else could be discussed because they were getting nowhere on the money issue.
“There were 22 pages in our brief,” he said. “The money was less than a page.
“An agreement is more than just money,” he added. “Money ends up something everyone understands.”