Yesterday the superintendent’s office put out a publication, BPS This Week, that put a ‘creative’ spin on two points that deserve to be clarified.

Point #1: State law requires that there must be a new performance evaluation system in place by September and the union has not cooperated in negotiating the terms of that issue because it refuses to separate the issue from the master bargain.

The union’s response: The issue is far more complicated than this and there are countless moving parts to reconcile. Let’s just say the following. We cannot negotiate piecemeal, as seems to be the district’s desire. There are a number of other outstanding areas tied into performance evaluation–the establishment of a new and exciting peer assistance and review program, enhanced professional growth opportunities for our members, and how to improve and make more relevant professional development, to name just a few items. The issues are inextricably connected, and cannot be done piecemeal. Yes, we want to negotiate performance evaluation, but it has to be done as part of the entire package. The school district is disingenuous when it says that these individual contract items can be negotiated as if they operate in silos.

Point #2: The school district would like to settle the contract ‘right away,’ but the union somehow is seeking to elongate the mediation process more than is necessary. Here’s what the superintendent’s office said: “While we are eager, as you are, to settle the contract right away, official BTU publications suggest that the union expects the mediation may take a year or more. We hope it does not.” The union, according to the school district spin, is seeking to prolong the mediation process. Really.

The union’s response: Both the school department and the BTU voluntarily entered into the state-sanctioned mediation process. The process takes time, and no one can predict how long it will take. The school department knows this as well as we do. It could take 2 months; it could take two years. The process has many components to it, and each component takes time. Neither party can manipulate the process by shortening the procedures and protocols. Again, the school department knew this, as did we, when both parties volunteered to partake in the process two months ago. If the superintendent has a secret plan to shorten this process, we would welcome her participation. Now for the more hopeful news.

The parties can suspend the mediation process if we were to resume negotiations. The BTU would agree to resume negotiations if the school district decided that it had something new to offer us on the outstanding issues. But in what has become a hallmark of this administration, procrastination is endemic. We have seen this failure-to-act-decisively in one issue after another: contract negotiations, the TIF grant, the SPED reorganization, late school buses, student assignment, school closings, the burgeoning waiting lists for early childhood students, and even the discarding of expired, frozen food. Rather than fixing what’s broken and looking for solutions, the district leadership seems to prefer looking for a scapegoat to mask its own deficiencies.