Welcome back and Happy New Year! We hope your holiday break had some “break” in it and that your time with loved ones was enjoyable.
There are a few deadlines coming up, one for the Early Termination Incentive and the other for filing an application for the sick leave bank.
For the Early Termination Incentive, see the circular. The upcoming deadline is next Thursday, January 14.
For the application for the Sick Leave Bank, the upcoming deadline is this Friday. January 8. Use this form to apply (disregard the December 1 deadline posted), and learn more.
Please plan to join us for “What is the Future for Public Schools in Boston?” on Thursday, January 14 from 6-8 PM at Madison Park. At this emergency town hall, we will discuss the Boston Compact and Enroll Boston, school closures, charter ballot initiative’s impact on BPS and school budgets. See the BTU website to download flyers and for more information. Thank you for helping us spread the word!
The Boston Teachers Union and the Boston School Committee (BSC) will begin negotiations on a successor Collective Bargaining Agreement early next month. As a first step, our membership appointed a 50-member Collective Bargaining Committee in the fall and solicited proposed bargaining items from our membership. More than 220 items were submitted from our membership at large as well as from many of our groups (SLP, nurses, COSESS and so on), and the CBC met four times over a two-month period to review, tweak, and prioritize the items submitted.
Read an outline of the package. It is a thorough outline and touches on the major items that will be presented to the BSC. Although comprehensive, it is not all-inclusive of the package — with all the “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed — that will be submitted to the BSC when formal negotiations begin. The package as shown will be before the membership for questions and discussion at our next meeting on January 13.
One proposal in our package is the guarantee of a full-day kindergarten seat for all 4-year olds in the city of Boston. Here’s a Boston Globe report on the kindergarten issue written last week.