Group seeks D-11 talks boycott after CSEA refuses to open door

Collective bargaining between Colorado Springs School District 11 and the teachers union will remain behind closed doors this year.

The board of the Colorado Springs Education Association voted unanimously to turn down a request by the D-11 school board to hold the meetings in public.

In a letter to the D-11 board Wednesday, CSEA President Kevin Marshall said Tuesday’s vote was to “protect the integrity of the collective bargaining agreement between teachers and safeguard the future of children by keeping the negotiations private.”

Late Wednesday, however, Americans for Prosperity said it will start a campaign this morning to persuade the D-11 board to boycott negotiations until CSEA agrees to meet in public.

The group has contracted with a company to call up to 10,000 Americans for Prosperity supporters to tell them what’s going on and ask if they’re willing to be patched through to the phone of one of three D-11 board members the organization considers swing votes on the issue — Tom Strand, Sandra Mann and Charles Bobbitt, said Jeff Crank, Colorado director for the organization.

He said board members Bob Null and Al Loma are reliable supporters of the effort, while board members Jan Tanner and LuAnn Long are reliable opponents.

Crank said the organization also will start an e-mail campaign and will activate a website (www.transparentd11.com) this morning to allow people to voice their opinion on the issue.

“I’m disappointed that the union would think it’s OK to negotiate hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money in the dark,” Crank said. “This year is when the master agreement is up, and negotiations are never more important than now.

“I hope the board rejects this. They could just say we won’t negotiate with you at all if it isn’t in public. I hope the school  board does that.”

Strand, board president, said late Wednesday that he isn’t sure how the board might respond to the demands from Crank’s organization.

“I don’t like being muscled by some outside group,” he said after leaving a five-hour D-11 board budget retreat. “But I do like the idea of being open and transparent.”

He said he’s a strong believer in collective bargaining and doesn’t think it’s helpful to “take your ball and go home if you don’t get your way.”

He said he fears that talk of boycotting negotiations builds walls rather than collaboration.

“I want to be responsive to the stakeholders in the district on this issue,” he said, adding that he’s heard from people on both sides.

Union officials have said that opening the meetings could result in posturing and politicizing and divert focus from doing right by students.

Under the master agreement, negotiations are not required to be open unless the boards of both sides agree to waive it.

“We are very disappointed,” Strand said. Last week the board voted to  ask the union to open negotiating sessions because taxpayers’ money is on the line.

Strand said open meetings would give the public access into “the thought processes and problem solving” that go into such negotiations. But he added that some in the community felt public scrutiny might make some negotiators more guarded and less open to new ideas.

Union officials told D-11 earlier this week that negotiations should remain closed “this year” because both teams are in the midst of learning a new form of bargaining called interest-based bargaining.  

Both sides recently received training from a mediation company and have just begun to use the system. IBB facilitators had suggested to both parties that the meetings be closed until they all were proficient at the process, the union said.

In the IBB process, everyone at the table gets a chance to discuss common interests in a nonconfrontational way. In traditional negotiations, spokespersons present formal sets of demands.

Under terms of the contract, there will be one public meeting in April at which the positions of both sides are laid out.

Deputy Superintendent Mary Thurman, head of D-11’s negotiating team, said that open meetings might be possible in the future when everyone is comfortable with the new process.

The negotiators will meet  once a week, and they expect an agreement to be hammered out by the end of June.

This year, all provisions in the master agreement are on the table for the first time in more than 16 years.

The agreement covers issues such as student discipline, stipends, post-employment benefits and board of education rights.

Forty-two of 178 districts in the state have collective bargaining. Only Poudre School District in Fort Collins opens negotiations to the public.