May 10, 2007 - OBSERVATION I arrived at the meeting about ten minutes after the scheduled start time, and when I entered, the whole negotiation team was talking about leadership, while Rob Panning-Miller was writing the agenda on a flip-chart. I learned later that the mediator from the State Bureau of Mediation Services had called in sick less than an hour before the negotiation session started, and so Rob essentially led the meeting, with general consent from all at the table. As happened at the last meeting, Rob and Emma spoke most frequently during the meeting, but there was input from many who were seated at the table. One notable voice from the district was Von Sheppard, who took the lead on several points of discussion for the district. Throughout the discussion, the entire group consistently referenced a handout about the process for discussion. They again seemed to be trying to follow a prescribed procedure, and kept referring to this handout with questions about how the conversation was supposed to proceed. The listed agenda was: [The discussion of leadership that I heard upon entering appeared to be the "opening" agenda item. After listening for a while, it seemed that the group had been tasked with discussing what leadership was. People seemed pretty detached from the discussion, and the topic was dropped quickly once the next agenda item was suggested.] [I was asked to introduce myself early in the meeting, which I did as "Seth Kirk, parent". This prompted a follow-up question from one teacher about where my kids attended school.] The group was asked about the minutes from the last meeting, which they apparently all had a copy of, and nobody had any real changes to make. The discussion then shifted to additional "issues", and Rob asserted things quickly here, adding six issues to the list generated at the last meeting. Rob also suggested the division of some previously-identified issues and the consolidation of others. Emma and the district negotiators generally agreed with the issue formatting, and didn't add more of their own beyond the five they identified at the last meeting. The resulting combined list was this: After MFT added the last six issues to the list, several comments were made about how long it would take to work through all of these. At the last meeting, it was mentioned that the group should plan on approximately eight hours for the negotiation of each issue. Rob mentioned that the union had done that math, and that he and MFT realized how much meeting time it would take to work through seventeen separate issues. In this discussion about new issues, Emma stated that she thought it was a general goal of the group to try to finish the negotiation process by the beginning of September. Nobody from MFT answered her directly, and as attention turned to Rob for a response, he generally indicated that full resolution of the issues was more important than completing the negotiations by any particular date. [At a break in the meeting, I mentioned to one of the district administrators that I thought it sounded like it was going to be a long summer. He agreed.] The discussion then turned to the issue of what the cut-off date would be for introducing any more new issues. The discussion quickly started with the assumption that Emma and the district wanted May 31 to be the last day to introduce new issues, and that Rob and MFT wanted to extend the date to introduce new issues until the end of June. The district seemed a little surprised that MFT wanted to keep the window for new issues open so long, and MFT seemed to not understand why there was any objection to keeping the option for introducing new issues open as long as possible. Emma and the district folks pushed Rob and the teachers on this, and at some point someone from the district suggested a "compromise" of the new-issues limit being June 22 instead of "the end of June". Rob and the district were still resistant to a June 22 limit, which prompted a few sharp comments from Emma asking why it was such a big deal to keep the option for new issues open for so long. The main argument from the teachers seemed to be that the MFT membership was working through June 12, and needed some time after that to digest the issues presented to that point and to think if there were any further issues. MFT did say that it was their intention to distribute the list of negotiation issues to their membership in the relatively near future. It was not clear to me how this proposed communication fit with the general communication strategy outlined at the last meeting, but everybody at the table seemed to accept the fact that MFT would proceed with this communication. Rob finally said that he would be surprised if there was one more issue identified by the end of June and that he would be "shocked" if there were two more issues identified. In response to this, Emma said "fine, have your end-of-June date" while noting quite clearly that Rob said he was not expecting any more issues. The two sides then tried to write down a date and got into another little disagreement about which specific meeting the issue deadline should be. They couldn't agree if it should be June 22 or June 29, so they decided just to table the whole decision and wait until the State mediator was back in the room to make a final decision. One district representative suggested that the issues as defined were so broad, that it was hard to imaging any issue that could be later identified which would not fit into one of the identified categories. Inserted in this discussion about the issues cut-off date was a discussion about the schedule for future meetings. The whole discussion about the issue cut-off date and the meting schedule took almost 45 minutes of the two-hour meeting. The discussion then turned to expanding on the identified issues. As the discussion for the rest of the meeting proceeded, there seemed to be constant reference to an agreed-upon procedure for the conversation. In particular, after each issue was introduced, both the district and the union listed their "interests" related to this issue. For each issue, either one party or the other objected to one of the "interests" identified by the other party, as not being an "issue" but rather a "strategy". As this objection was repeated, it was clear that the process being followed made clear distinctions between "interests" and "processes" for addressing those interests. One example of this was with the issue of teacher transfer and layoff. The district had identified an "interest" of "empowering schools to select and retain teachers who are the 'best fit' for the position/program". MFT agreed that having the best-fit teacher was an "interest", but felt that "empowering schools to select..." was a "position". Rob suggested talking about the issue of technology first, as it was likely one of the least contentious issues. He invited the district to present their interests around this issue. Emma had prepared a printed sheet that listed all of the districts interests associated with each of their five identified issues, and she passed this out to all at the table. For each issue discussed, Rob read aloud a list of their interests. Emma expanded on the issue of "technology" to define it as: Increased teacher technology capacity will positively effect student learning, community relationships and critical efficiency. She then listed the district's interests related to this as: Rob responded with MFT's interests as: There was some minor discussion about these interests, about the procedure for discussing them and a little bit of expansion about what some of the interests meant. The issue of professional / staff development was then discussed. The district's interests: The union's interests: Following this listing of interests, there was quite a bit of discussion about some of the interests identified by each side, about whether they were "interests" or "strategies" and some detail about what each interest might mean or not mean. By this point, the negotiators seemed to realize that the meeting was mostly positioning by each side, followed by picking at the semantics of various identified interests. Seemingly confident that no real negotiation was happening, they took up the final issue of the evening: Teacher transfer and layoff The districts interests: The union's interests: The meaning of the last-listed interest of the teachers was discussed in some detail. When this discussion was done, there were only ten minutes left in the scheduled meeting time, and both sides seemed to be agreeing that they were not going to get much further in this session. Emma asserted an end to the issues and interests discussion, and then announced that she needed to do something. She retrieved two bags of scrolls and passed them around the table. Each group member received one of the scrolls, which turned out to be a statement from the MPS School Board on a heavy 8.5" x 11" paper with some statement from the Board (dated March 23, I believe) about the teachers being partners and integral to the success of MPS. Emma made a couple comments about MPS valuing the teachers, and the teachers responded quietly. The group then quickly set the agenda for the next meeting: The meeting concluded with one-word summaries from each negotiator, and was adjourned five minutes early. |