CPEEA Local News

Good evening, Check your email for an invitation to our General Membership Meeting Tomorrow (Thursday) at 3:00 PM

This is another great webinar opportunity on  Thursday, August 20 th  7:00 PM – 8:00 PM EST. It takes a whole village to support a whole child, and the strain on our school communities, including our education support professionals, is unprecedented. In this webinar, Dr. Chris Cipriano, Assistant Professor and Director of Research at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, will provide social and emotional learning (SEL) strategies to support ESPs within the school ecosystem to navigate the challenging emotions of these rapidly evolving times. Participants will have the opportunity to explore their complex feelings surrounding the uncertainty caused by COVID-19 and learn strategies for harnessing emotions to cope in healthy and productive ways. Resources for building resilience will be provided and tips for practicing self-care will be tailored to support the unique needs identified by participants. The facilitators for this event will be Grace Hwang Friedman, a...

Members I just wanted to let you know that over the last week the leadership of the KCEA (Kent County Education Association) have been meeting to solidify a statement regarding the return to school in a few weeks.  Mandy Rodriquez and I attended those meetings and approve of the statetment that is to be released. The KCEA will be sending an email blast to all members tomorrow before they release this to the media, so keep your eyes open. Thanks, Kathy Commeret

Thank you for your survey responses, please keep them coming in.  Because, I am reading questions about what the safety protocols would be I am attaching the MI Safe Schools Road Map.  Right now we are in Phase 4 so read pages 21-36.  You will see some of the the safety protocol we have to follow regarding positive tests will be dependent on the what the Kent County Health Dept. recommends. We don't have a finalized document from them yet.  However, you can get an idea of what is required and recommended by reading this document.  Mi Safe Schools Roadmap

Student and Staff Health and Safety is our number one concern as we work with the district to develop a plan to return to school in less than 6 weeks.  Please take the survey below if you have not already, it should be sent out through the building reps today! Return to School Survey

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 ...

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%.