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Seattle Students Back To School Thursday After Striking Teachers, District Reach Tentative Deal

Ted S. Warren
/
AP
Members of the Seattle Education Association arrive at a meeting hall in Seattle to discuss a tentative contract agreement with the district.

UPDATED — Seattle Public Schools’ 53,000 students will return to classes Thursday after district negotiators reached a tentative, three-year contract agreement with the striking teachers union, both sides have announced.

Though the union’s full membership will not vote on the tentative contract until Sunday, a governing body of union leaders voted Tuesday evening to accept the deal and suspend the strike to allow school to resume.

After six days without school, the announcement offers relief to thousands of Seattle parents who have scrambled to find childcare for their kids. Teachers will return to their work on Wednesday to prepare for the new year.

“The parties were far apart for a long time, but in the end, we found common ground — wanting to make sure our children get the best education that they can,” said Seattle Public Schools’ lead negotiator, Geoff Miller.

The proposed agreement — announced early Tuesday after all-night, marathon negotiations — includes a district plan to lengthen the school day and salary increases closer to what district officials had been proposing.

Union leaders also claimed victory, saying the deal guaranteed student recess time, scrapped an outmoded piece of the district’s teacher evaluation system and required the district to hire help to relieve overworked therapists.

“We really feel like this is a new era for public education, where we’re opening the doors for progress on a variety of issues beyond the traditional pay and benefits,” union president Jonathan Knapp said Tuesday.

What’s In The Tentative Agreement

District officials and union leaders kept details of the tentative agreement under wraps until assembled union representatives could vote on the deal Tuesday evening. According to a summary distributed to representatives at that meeting, the tentative agreement includes:

  • Salary increases of 3 percent in the first year, 2 percent in the second year and 4.5 percent in the third year. State cost-of-living adjustments add another 4.8 percent in the first two years. (The union’s latest proposal had called for increases of 4.5 percent and 5 percent over a two-year contract.)
  • A longer instructional day for students. Beginning in the 2017-18 school year, 20 minutes of teachers’ before- and after-school prep time has been converted into extra classroom time. But the deal also calls for a one-hour early release or late start for students each week. The district will compensate teachers for the added time, union leaders said, and will give teachers more prep time.
  • Guaranteed recess. Parent groups had raised concerns about schools cutting student recess time short. Union members brought the issue to the bargaining table, and the tentative agreement includes a guarantee that all students in Grades K-5 will receive at least 30 minutes of recess.
  • The elimination of the Seattle Student Growth Rating. Union leaders had hoped to oust the metric — which tracks teachers’ performance using changes in student test scores from one year to the next — from the district’s teacher evaluation system. “It’s gone. I am so excited that thing is gone,” said union vice president Phyllis Campano.
  • Equity measures. Over the course of the three-year deal, committees focused on eliminating racial disparities in discipline and opportunity gaps in test scores will launch in 30 schools — 10 in the first year, 10 more in the second year and another 10 in the third year, Campano said.
  • A testing committee, staffed by five union members and three district employees, tasked with finding ways to reduce the impact of testing. The panel will make recommendations to the superintendent, but it fell short of the union’s initial ask to have an equal say in whether to adopt assessments beyond those required by state or federal mandate. “We went for the sky. We had to,” Campano said. "But we’ve got a foot in the door."
  • 'Enforceable' caseloads. The deal aims to ease workloads for therapists, psychologists and audiologists by spelling out student-to-staff ratios for — the union said — the first time ever. “There were no numbers before,” Campano said.
  • Lower special education student-to-teacher ratios for preschool classrooms and in classrooms serving students with distinct social and emotional needs.

Parents Express Relief And Support For Teachers

TeacherStrikeParentsReact.mp3

Parents reacted with relief that school may soon get underway. At Miller Community Center in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, parents were dropping off their children for another day of child care provided by the city of Seattle. 

Javeed Shah arrived there around 8:30 a.m. to drop off his son, Jonah, who's entering first grade. He said arranging child care has been an inconvenience, but he supports the teachers in their labor dispute with the district.

“I think that what the teachers were striking for was a good cause, so I’m okay with it," Shah said. 

Rebecca Lawrence expressed a similar note of support. 

"I hope our teachers and students got what they needed and I hope the district can pay for it all," she said.

Still, the strike has been more than an inconvenience for her. She said it's taken a toll. 

"I’m the single parent of two children, one of whom has special needs. It's been a tough five days," Lawrence said. "The added pressure of asking our kids with special needs to roll with the mix has been pretty stressful.”

This post was updated with details of the union governing body's vote at 9:40 p.m. PDT. Paula Wissel contributed to this report.

Kyle Stokes covers the issues facing kids and the policies impacting Washington's schools for KPLU.