What Happened

We were very pleased to see Ana Hernandez at the table, the chair of the School Committee. We’ve come to agreement on many items, including adjustments to funeral leave, personal leave, commencement leave, and religious leave, an alumni hiring incentive, snow days and PD for clerks, paid prep time for paras and educators working together, para leads, and many housekeeping provisions. We’ve also seen movement on a multilingual stipend and a toileting stipend. This is thanks to the incredible work of our negotiating team, our CAT team, and our membership at large.

We still have the furthest to move on several important priorities, including paid parental and family medical leave, class size and caseload caps, coverage pay for clerks, and wages, particularly for our paraprofessionals and clerks. The district’s current wage proposal for paraprofessionals would result in a starting wage of $26,410 annually at the end of the contract. That is not a living wage in the city of Chelsea, and our paras deserve to afford to live in the city where they work.

Our full response package can be found here. You can see our presentation from tonight, highlighting comparisons with surrounding districts here. We continue to propose 12 weeks of paid parental and family medical leave, separate stipends for paras who are toileting students and working in sub-separate classrooms, class size and caseload caps, and competitive wages. To note, after reviewing the surrounding districts’ contracts and schedules, we found that contractual and student time at CPS is consistently lower than surrounding districts, and meeting time is on the high end. Therefore, part of our response included asking for a 30 minute lunch, the elimination of 2 PD days, eliminating department meetings, and lengthening the school day by five minutes at the ELC, and ten minutes at all other schools. Basically, more time with students for more pay, bringing us in line with surrounding districts.

Our time finished with the district providing some information about the budget and finances for next year. We look forward to seeing their full responses at our next session on May 13th.

Next Steps

We need our members to continue showing their support as we continue to fight for paid leave, living and competitive wages, and the working conditions we need to create the schools our students deserve. 

So…. how can you help? 

1. Like and comment on our CTU social media.

2. We are looking to continue increasing our silent rep numbers and for members to be ready to provide testimony for class size and caseload caps and toileting and sub-separate para differentials. Please sign up for that here!

3. We also want to make sure the community is aware of our contract proposals. You can sign up to speak at the May School Committee meeting happening THIS THURSDAY AT 7 PM here!

4. Show support with another district walk-in on May 13th! RSVP here!

In solidarity,

CTU Negotiating Team