Bargaining Update Days 2 and 3

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 do not believe it will be the worst case scenario that some politicians were predicting.  I have full confidence that our bargaining team will be able to make progress on our financial proposals, it will just have to wait for a little bit.  Please keep checking back for updates!