CPEEA Local News

This week, we met again on Tuesday and Wednesday with the district.  We had very productive discussions and made progress on some of our language proposals.  Specifically, we made progress on class sizes, which is really encouraging.   We are hopefully going to finish and resolve our language issues with the contract this week.  At this point, we have agreed to wait until the district gets more information on the state and federal funding to move forward with financial discussions.  With some of the recent information coming from the lawmakers in Lansing this week, we believe this will be beneficial for the union. Rather than settle for something less, when we really don't know what the reduction in per pupil is going to be, we will wait until we have a clearer picture of the funding and then move forward with financial negotiations.  My personal feeling is that lawmakers initially were trying to "scare" us into understanding that this could be a huge cut.  In reality, I

Thursday we presented out proposals to the board, the team put a lot of thought into our presentations to explain the history and reasoning behind them.  We kept our discussions mostly on the language of the contract.  The district seemed receptive to our proposals.  Next week, we will head back to the bargaining table to start working on details.  Overall, it was a really good day, and we are happy to have everything out there! Just a note on the previous post.  The 17% fund balance the district says they have is  with  a $650 proposed cut per pupil (2019-2020.) This hasn't even happened or many not happen.  Without that cut, we estimate the fund balance to be more like 19.5%. 

Good morning members, The bargaining team is excited to be heading to the table starting Thursday.  Some food for thought:  Even before Covid 19 hit, our district had exceeded their predictions for increasing the fund balance from year to year.  Currently they are at 17% .  For those of us who have been in CP a long time this is the highest it has ever been.  Even with predictions for cuts to the per pupil funding from the state, our district is financially secure and has the money to spend on it’s employees.  We are in a MUCH better position than many other districts.  So keep that in mind when voting on this year’s contract.  We have endured many cuts over the years and are looking for the district to invest back into it’s staff and students.   Here are some of our goals: -Steps and Salary increases for all employees (bringing up our salary schedule to be competitive with other districts in Kent County.) -District pays the maximum state allowed amount (hard cap) for all e