Tennessee Teacher Union Pushes For More Benefits For Educators In Lowest Performing District

Image Credit: Thomas R Machnitzki / CC

The Tennessee Conservative [By Paula Gomes] –

Teachers in the lowest performing school district in Tennessee want to negotiate a new labor agreement. One of the two teachers unions in Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) states they have enough signatures to force the district to begin negotiations.

The union says that more than 15% of educators in the district are ready to return to the bargaining table. More than four years have passed since the previous agreement expired.

President of the United Education Association of Shelby County, Danette Stokes, presented a petition during the most recent MSCS board meeting calling for collaborative conferencing.

The Professional Educators Collaborative Conferencing Act in Tennessee says that a minimum of 15% of eligible school district employees must sign a petition before the process can begin. During collaborative conferencing, educators get to discuss salary, insurance, benefits and working conditions with the school district that employs them.

However, the petition does not guarantee negotiations. The school board must verify the petition signatures and then create a committee made up of district officials and board members. Their job will be to oversee a poll that asks all educators and some other classroom employees if they want to begin collaborative conferencing and select which of the two teachers unions will represent them during that process. Over half of MSCS teachers, around 6,000, would have to agree.

The last time teachers met with MSCS was in 2019, but the two sides did not agree on a new contract. Educators in the district have been operating without a memorandum of understanding (MOU) since 2018 when the last agreement expired.

Newly released data places Shelby County Schools with some of the biggest drops in math and reading scores across the country, according to the “nation’s report card.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics released the results of their National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) on Monday. NAEP is the largest “nationally representative and continuing assessment” of how students are achieving in public and private schools across the country. Assessments are administered to students in fourth and eighth grade.

About the Author: Paula Gomes is a Tennessee resident and reporter for The Tennessee Conservative. You can reach Paula at paula@tennesseeconservativenews.com.

4 thoughts on “Tennessee Teacher Union Pushes For More Benefits For Educators In Lowest Performing District

  • October 28, 2022 at 10:17 pm
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    More benefits does not make better teachers! Just throwing good money after bad. Get rid of the bad teachers and the worthless Greedy union.

    Reply
  • October 29, 2022 at 1:02 pm
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    Yep, just throw more money at the problem instead of addressing the real issues. All the blame doesn’t fall on the teachers, a lot belongs to the parents who are both working or single parents struggling to survive. There are no easy answers but one thing we’ve proven time and time again is that throwing money at the schools get us nothing but more demands from the unions.

    Reply
  • October 29, 2022 at 2:47 pm
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    Think in terms of the quality of the final product as delivered to the final consumer, in this case the students. Can anyone identify a situation where unionization has increased the quality of the product/service delivered to the final recipient?

    Reply
  • November 4, 2022 at 4:40 pm
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    Seems to me all public employees need to evaluated and paid on a merit based scale.
    Do away with collective bargaining, it’s just another cudgel the unions use to intimidate their employers Tennessee Citizens

    Reply

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