Susan McClintic and Kari Schuster are heads of the Columbia Missouri National Educator's Association and the Columbia Missouri State Teacher's Association respectively. The two disagree with how teachers in the Columbia Public School District should be represented. This has been an ongoing process for the past three years that McClintic and the CMNEA have tried to get changed. Right now, CPS has a 'meet and confer' type representation policy, where members from both the CMNEA and the CMSTA share their feelings on salaries, benefits, and working conditions.
Susan McClintic, CMNEA
Right now, the way CPS handles this is up in the air. Last spring, McClintic sent a letter to Superintendent Chris Belcher, asking him to start the process of a vote for collective bargaining. McClintic supports Version One, an exclusive representation model where one group is supposed to represent all teachers. Teachers in the district would vote for one teacher group they'd like to represent them, whether that be the CMNEA, the CMSTA, or any other group that makes it on the ballot. All the while, McClintic has been trying to tell people that just because only one group would represent teachers, the other side would be represented too. The other group, disagrees.
Kari Schuster, CMSTA
Kari Schuster of the CMSTA supports Version Two. She's worried the district would only get one group's opinion if the district went with Version One. Version Two first allows teachers to vote whether they want single representation, multiple representation, or no representation at all. If the teachers voted for single representation, then teachers could vote for which group represents them. If teachers voted for multiple representation though, the district could go back to its 'meet and confer' method if it wanted.
Right now, the board has not decided whether they like one version more than the other. The board had first looked over just Version One, and they still have not looked over Version Two as a group. However, Version One got knocked back down to the same level when school board member Jonathan Sessions asked that Version One not be reviewed now either. Now, the district can bring up Version Two, Version One, or a completely different version if it chooses. This is a story completely different from another big issue going on right now in CPS, the school's boundary scenarios with new Battle High. The stories seem to just keep coming out.
Here's a story I did after Sessions sent Version One back down.
No comments:
Post a Comment