After the district announced its budget cuts earlier this year, they weren’t done, but pushback from DFT president Ethan Fisher worked.
The district had been pushing to move Activity Director positions out of the Teachers’ bargaining unit and into the Principals’ unit. But Fisher said the district will now defer to the bargaining process.
“The Activity Director has been in our contract since 1991, and anecdotally, teachers were doing that work from the 1960s and 70s,” Fisher said.
While other districts have those positions in Principals units, Fisher considered moving those positions arbitrarily a contract violation and put in a demand to bargain the move. The district denied it, leading DFT to file a grievance.
By displacing the two activities directors, those positions would have been posted and hired based on principal licensure instead of teachers, Fisher said, so not only would the union be losing positions, but it would have lost work as well.
The two current directors have been with the district for more than 30 years, Fisher said.
“It’s bigger than those two positions,” Fisher said. He said he had told the superintendent that if the district didn’t change course, it would have set back labor relations and wouldn’t be easy to forget. He also said he was frustrated by the lack of response from Labor-endorsed school board members during this dispute.
Fisher added that the middle and high schools are changing full-time media specialists to half time, “effectively cutting staffing in half. Teachers and students rely on those to be open all day every day, and now that support is gone 50% of the time.”