Teachers in Boulder upset over stalled contract negotiations packed a school board meeting Tuesday — demanding the district return to the bargaining table but no new meetings have been scheduled.
Teachers last week voted 94 percent to reject a contract being offered by the district that would give the district’s 2,000 teachers a 1 percent stipend for the 2009-10 school year that would not be applied to their base pay.
Teachers are asking for negotiations to resume, but the district is calling for an independent fact-finder.
Last spring protesting teachers staged whole-school sickouts and the union instructed teachers to work only to contract and not do any extra work.
Union officials say they are not pushing their members toward any further job actions, and have rejected claims that a strike is approaching.
“We are not anywhere close to that,” said Melissa Tingley, president of the Boulder Valley Education Association. “We are still asking them to go to the table.”
Boulder has never had a strike, according to the Colorado Education Association.
The last teacher strike in Colorado was in 1994 — a five-day walkout in Denver. Any such labor action in Boulder would require one of the parties to ask out of the current contract. The union would also have to file a 30-day notice of its intent with the state Department of Labor.
Superintendent Chris King has released statements saying the labor disagreement will not impact the classroom.
Ken Roberge, school board president, said the board has told the district to continue negotiating.
“The current state of affairs is the last public offer asks to go to an impartial fact finder and they are resistant to that. Maybe there is another way to approach this.”
The district’s classified employees union and paraprofessional unions also are without a contract for 2009-10.
Administrators were given the 1 percent stipend and Boulder’s superintendent received no increase on his $200,260 annual salary.
The district says the current financial downturn is affecting the bottom line and money isn’t there for cost-of-living raises. The 1 percent stipend would amount to $1.8 million, district officials say.
Teachers argue that the district received a 4.9 percent increase this year as mandated by Amendment 23 — which requires the state fund K-12 education by the inflationary figure plus 1 percentage point.
That means for the 2009-10 school year, all Colorado school districts received a base amount of $5,507 per student, or about $250 more per student than the year before.
The state may ask for $110 million back — or 1.9 percent of state funding — from Colorado school districts in an emergency fiscal call, which would amount to $3.8 million for Boulder.
Nevertheless, teachers say even with a 3 percent increase, that money should be passed on.
“They all got that money,” said Tingley. “They just got a profit. You need to profit share with your employees. But they budgeted it and they had other priorities.”
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com
