I am so proud of and impressed by your dedication to our colleagues and our students. Our turnout tonight was such a wonderful celebration of solidarity and hope. You are the union!!!

Thanks to your presence, the presence of well over 100 colleagues, the district made their first movement on language proposals since May. We filled the negotiating room with CTU red!

We have now come to a tentative agreement on degree stipends for clerks and received a generous counter proposal on tuition reimbursement for both clerks and paraprofessionals. We also asked for the district’s reasoning on their rejections or limited movement on other language proposals and are looking forward to hearing the answers on September 30th. We also collected ideas from members about how they would use more time with students. If you want to hear more details, please reach out to the dozens of colleagues who attended from every school (and please share if you were there yourself!!). You can also see pictures and videos from tonight on our Instagram, @chelseateachersunion1340, and tag us in anything you’re sharing from tonight!

We know that working conditions, in addition to salary and benefits, impact one’s decision to stay in the district. If the District is truly committed to finding a path forward, working with us to improve our working conditions and our student’s learning conditions is imperative. 

Both the district’s team and our negotiating team will be taking next week to work on counter proposals. Our team will be working off of detailed financial information that the district shared with us this evening.

We have repeatedly shown that we are interested in settling the contract as soon as possible, so long as the terms are good for our students and our members. We look forward to the district demonstrating the same urgency.

In solidarity,

CTU Negotiating Team