Kenosha Education Association

KUSD Request to Open Contract

The KEA Bargaining Team met with the District’s team this past Wednesday evening to follow up on a meeting held on January 26, 2012.  At the January 26 meeting, the District’s team made only a verbal presentation on what exactly they were asking KEA teachers to consider regarding financial concessions.  For the first time, we were told they wanted teachers to concede the three percent increase, the twelve percent employee contribution for health insurance, and the five point eight percent pension contributions.  They also confirmed verbally, once again, there would be layoffs regardless of whether or not any financial concessions were provided.

Your KEA Bargaining Team reviewed your responses to the surveys that were conducted in each of the buildings.  Your feedback indicated: 1) lacking confidence in the District’s administration to manage the budget, 2) increasing class size is not a solution to the budget problem, and 3) reducing teaching positions is creating more education problems rather than fixing the budget.  In fact, the story around the state where teachers in other districts did implement the contributions described above is that layoffs occurred anyway and class sizes increased, increasing the ever-growing hardships on classroom teachers every day.

Clearly, these issues have nothing to do with the cost of employing teachers and everything to do with Scott Walker’s $1.6 billion cut to funding public education.  Like the power grab in Madison, it has become a power grab in school districts throughout the state.  KUSD is no exception.

Some more examples of a KUSD power play include when our efforts to help this past March and June were rebuffed without discussion, simply because District officials weren’t available to meet.  You may recall, in those instances, the KEA Bargaining Team was prepared to schedule meetings for your consideration in contributing millions of dollars back to the District; as usual, however, it wasn’t what they wanted, so they weren’t interested.

To make matters worse, you need to know that this past week, the WEA Trust presented a proposal to the District that would have saved them tens of millions of dollars in health insurance costs.  This would include an immediate savings for next school year of about $8 million.  This savings is in addition to over $80 million the District has saved already, based on the partnership we created in working on controlling these ever-growing costs.  Once again, this apparently isn’t enough for them.

After careful consideration of your concerns and based on a lack of good faith effort on the District’s part to show it is willing to address your concerns, your KEA Bargaining Team informed the District at the meeting this past Wednesday that we will not open the contract.  At the heart of this issue for KEA teachers is the matter of TRUST.  Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen Transformational Plans proposed without any collaboration from KEA members.  The many good things accomplished in the most recent past at KUSD were as a result of the great collaboration that seems to all of us to have dissipated under this administrative leadership team.

Layoffs 

Once again, we were clearly misled.  We met with the District late last Thursday afternoon to hear from them on layoffs at the elementary school level.  We were assured that the moves were all based on seniority and on individual certifications.  Principals were to have individual meetings with those impacted by the end of the day last Friday.  Since then, on a daily basis, we are learning that once again the District is not following the contract.  We have no clue how they plan to adjust for voluntary layoffs and retirements, and they darn well know that impacts the decision they have already made.

We will continue to investigate and make every possible effort to work with the District to avoid the hardship, frustration, and confusion layoffs and displacements bring.