Chicago Public School officials pushed back Thursday against the contention by the Chicago Teachers Union that an independent factfinder found that the school district has more money to spend on settling the teachers contract than it is letting on.
“The main takeaway for us is that [the arbitrator] confirmed the district’s severe financial constraints,” said CPS CEO Pedro Martinez at a news conference Thursday.
Still, Martinez repeated that the two sides are close to an agreement. He said negotiations have helped scale back CTU’s proposals, but he said the union is still asking for more than the district can afford.
CPS officials were responding to recommendations released Wednesday evening by an arbitrator brought in as part of the legal process required before the CTU can call a strike. The CTU rejected the findings on Wednesday, which starts a 30 day clock to when they can strike.
But CTU leaders have yet to schedule a strike authorization vote — a fact that CPS’ lead negotiator Miguel Perretta said is a sign the two sides are close.
Martinez and his team said some of the ways the arbitrator’s report was described as favorable to the CTU’s positions are “simply untrue” and a “misrepresentation.”
In rejecting the report, CTU wrote that the factfinder “exploded the myth that CPS can’t afford to put more resources into schools.” The report didn’t explicitly say CPS has more money to afford CTU’s demands. However, it did say the school district could do better in a few areas, such as adding librarians, mostly because the costs were not exorbitant.
The arbitrator sided with the school district on its offer for raises and five staffing proposals while agreeing with the union’s proposals for hiring 30 additional librarians in each of the next three years, spending more to increase veteran teacher pay, providing stipends for educators working with students learning English and hiring more family engagement coordinators. He decided against offering recommendations in several other areas, sending the issues back to CPS and CTU for further negotiation.
CTU-CPS contract factfinding report
Perretta said school district officials are still contemplating the recommendations and will give them “the consideration they deserve.”
The school district did not officially accept or reject the factfinder’s recommendations, as CPS has done in the past. Perretta said the CTU rejected the report before the school district could respond. Only one side has to reject the findings to start the 30 day clock.
He said the school district sees the arbitrator’s report as an “opportunity for progress” in ongoing negotiations.
Despite rejecting the report, CTU leaders said they see it as providing a path forward, mostly because they think it will help convince the public that their demands are not outrageous.
CTU officials said they rejected the report because it didn’t provide recommendations on other unresolved staffing questions affecting nurses and social workers, and it didn’t examine several other key issues.
“It is an insufficient document to land,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said in a press conference Thursday. “It doesn’t have enough of the issues litigated, if you will.”
CPS officials contended that the arbitrator agreed with them on the most expensive item in the contract negotiations: cost-of-living increases for staff. The arbitrator did recommend the school district offer $10 million more, or a total of $20 million, to increase wages for veteran teachers than it has so far. According to the district, this is far less than what the CTU is asking for.
Historically, the factfinding report has proven to be merely a step in the legal process toward a work stoppage. The CTU has routinely rejected the findings and long complained that the exercise is stacked against the union because the state law limits the issues that can be considered for recommendation.
The process was established in 2010 at the urging of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. This is the fourth time factfinding has been used; the previous three times ended in a strike.
The union called the findings “incomplete” since the arbitrator was only charged with considering what the school district could afford based on its current resources, leaving alone other issues like teacher evaluations, who has final say over curriculum, teacher preparation time and more.