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After several weeks in which both sides maintained silence about contract mediation, the Berkeley Unified School District abruptly changed tactics this week, providing partial information on its latest offer to the Berkeley Federation of Teachers in an e-mail news release. 

BFT officials immediately labeled the district’s decision to go public “counterproductive and dangerous.” 

The exchange of public statements came a day after district and union representatives held a Tuesday bargaining session in their two-year-old contract dispute, and as teachers entered their third week of a “work to rule” job action. 

Negotiations are being conducted through a state-appointed mediator. Berkeley teachers have been working under their old contract since it expired two years ago. 

Another mediation session is scheduled for Monday. Meanwhile, the union’s executive committee met on Thursday for the first time in a month to evaluate its “work to rule” action and to discuss possible further plans. 

Up until this week, both the district and the union have confined their public statements and printed handouts to analyses of the district’s budget and comparisons of teacher salaries, but have steered clear of talking about what was actually being offered in the contract negotiations, and what was being refused. 

But in an e-mail released to the press entitled “Negotiations Update,” the district announced that it had offered “increases [to] all teachers’ salaries despite the need to cut the budget in order to do so,” as well as additional salary increases to veteran teachers and stipends for counselors and speech pathologists, increases in the district’s monetary contribution to medical benefits, and dental coverage for “many hourly teachers who are currently without [such] coverage.” 

The district provided no dollar figures or percentage increases in the e-mail release. 

“The board and superintendent believe they moved as far as they can without jeopardizing the solvency of the district or cutting critical programs,” the release concluded, and added that “the union has not accepted the district’s offer.” 

BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence said in a telephone interview that the district decided to release its proposal details “because our community has been critical of the fact that they have not been kept in the loop in regards to what has been going on in mediation. Because so many of our children are being affected by the ‘work to rule’ action, it seemed prudent that we let the community know that the school district is doing everything they can short of bankruptcy to put an end to this contract dispute.” 

At a Monday evening meeting at Longfellow Middle School called by the Berkeley PTA to provide information on the contract dispute, several parents expressed frustration at not knowing what was happening in the negotiations. 

After first hearing that the district was considering releasing negotiation details, BFT President Barry Fike spoke cautiously in a telephone interview, saying that “there were a lot of things going back and forth during the negotiation session, some of them in writing, some of them as verbal proposals. It wasn’t anything remarkably different coming from either side that hasn’t been heard in previous sessions.” 

But Fike said that he was reluctant to talk further about the negotiations since “in order to make it work, people have to be sensitive in not disclosing too much,” only saying that the union had yet to “cost out” the district’s salary increase proposal. 

“We’re still running the numbers,” he added. 

A day after receiving the district’s release, the BFT position had significantly hardened. 

“When the district goes public with proposals in the midst of highly sensitive mediation sessions, they can’t help but paint themselves into a corner and reduce opportunities for flexible solutions at the table,” the BFT release said. “It may be that the district’s negotiations team just momentarily lost their cool in releasing this information or it may be that their misguided strategy is to try to end mediation and push for a strike.” 

The BFT release said that the district’s salary increase proposal “does nothing to reverse Berkeley’s plummeting teacher compensation level rankings and keep our salaries competitive in either the short or long term.” 

The statement called the district proposal to increase veteran teacher pay “a thinly veiled attempt to try to divide teachers by offering larger salary increases to just a few of us” that “mysteriously appeared out of nowhere for the first time at the end of the day last Tuesday.” 

The BFT also said that the statement that the district offered to increase its monetary contribution to medical benefits was “simply not true.” 

Fike said in a telephone interview he did not think the union and the district were anywhere near that point of having negotiations break down. 

“If we were, it would be up to the mediator to decide that,” he said. 

At that point, the dispute would go to a three-person fact finding panel which would make a settlement recommendation. 

“If either side rejected that recommendation, the district would give us what is called its ‘last final offer,’ and the union would vote either to accept or bring the matter to our members for a strike vote,” he said. “From our point of view, getting to that point would be a worst-case scenario. That’s why we’re doing our darndest to come up with solutions now, to try to settle this in mediation.” 

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