15 Months Without Contracts

Your BTU Rep. Has These Signs

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:

• Will the school day be extended? What will be the compensation? What exactly will be taught and how can we make the teaching and learning experience most productive?
• What types of professional growth opportunities will our members be able to attain? How can we strengthen professional development?
• How can we shore up the ELL category training and be sure that it actually helps our English Language Learners?
• How can we have legitimate input on how to fix the disorganization currently existing in our SPED department?
• How soon can we enroll all provisional teachers and newly-eligible paraprofessionals into our tuition reimbursement program, which we insist be increased to $1,000 per year?

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 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:

• 6:45 to 7:10: Madison Park, O’Bryant, Timilty in the New Dudley St. Area.
• 7:40-8:00: Murphy School, Lambert’s Fruit, Dunkin Donuts overpass
• 8:30-ish: Roslindale Square, Sumner and other schools

• meet at the school 30 minutes before sign-in time
• gather outside the school or at a nearby intersection for a 20-minute period
• hold signs and greet passersby for 20 minutes
• go back to school in time for class to begin
• Thank you

• make sure all members are aware of the day and its significance
• hand out all explanatory materials in advance;  hand out the placards on the morning of the 18th.
• remind people on the 16th and 17th
• get the events organized on the morning of the 18th
• Call the BTU office or email crjohnson@btu.org with the numbers of participants at your site
• Thank you.

For staff: