We hope you had a restful Veterans’ Day weekend. This
week we will focus on one thing: our Talk to Teacher Rallies this Friday. Why do we need your help and your presence at your school rally? We have gone 15 months without a contract, and since August 29th the school district has refused to respond to us on a series of proposals we have made. On some of these proposals, their failure to respond goes back almost a year! We need “ and are entitled to “ answers on a host of issues such as:
We need serious and thoughtful answers to the above proposals so that we can settle our contract. Although it is likely we will have a negotiating session scheduled for the first week of December, we need to show the school district that their stalling tactics are unacceptable.
What do our members think?
1) Is the School District doing all it can to reach a new contract settlement with us?
2) Do you believe the district is working collaboratively with our members?
District’s Stall Tactics Hurt All
Our school system needs to have a contract in place that is good for students, affordable to the city, and fair to our members. The school district’s do-nothing-but-stall approach doesn’t work well whether we are talking about fixing the late bus problem, fixing the student assignment problem or settling our contract. That’s why all of us need to participate on Friday. Your BTU building representative has signs and instructions as to how we want to do this. By Wednesday we will have handouts for parents in 7 languages. (See below). The handouts will be available Wednesday afternoon for pick up at the union office. The non-English versions of the parent handouts will be available Wednesday for pickup and sooner by electronic communication to your building rep. We will send out the electronic versions as soon as we have them. We will have sufficient print copies available at the union office. Please make arrangements to come to the office and/or to arrange for pickup of these copies, as well as the placards seen above, We also have rented an airplane to fly over Boston all day on the 18th. The message: Talk to Teachers. Press releases will go out to all non-English weeklies and community papers, as well as the standard media.
Please send any pictures taken to the office c/o crjohnson@btu.org. Central Visibilities
We will have three particular visibilities, in addition to each school’s having its own. If anyone has time, we’d appreciate your presence, as well at the following locations where we have a few concentrated school populations:
In general, here’s what we ask members to do on the 18th:
Here’s what we ask all BTU reps to do:
Fliers
For staff: Here’s the flier we handed out to staff explaining Talk to Teachers.
For parents: Here’s the flier in English we will be handing out to parents and passersby.
Retirees and others who want to participate:
Please visit your previous school or any of the aforementioned three intersections. We will have a placard for you there! |