Contract Talks between Fargo School Board, Education Association move to mediation
FARGO, N.D. (KFGO) — After being unable to come to an agreement to a contract by the state-mandated July 1 deadline, talks between the Fargo School Board and Fargo Education Association (FEA) will go into mediation.
The sticking point in the discussions was the elementary teacher workday. The FEA said in a statement that members were frustrated that their pleas for protecting time before and after school to prepare for the day ahead are going unheard by school board members.
“We are still making progress on the two remaining topics, but the voice of educators who are burned out and pleading for the time they need to plan quality lessons for our students is being silenced,” FEA President Grant Kraft said. “We have met for nearly 100 hours, but Wednesday night was the first time we have exchanged salary proposals. Now the Board is insisting that we accept their proposal which removes protected times at the start and end of the school day in order to continue discussing salaries.”
Board Vice President Seth Holden said that wasn’t the only part of what he called a give-and-take proposal.
“We actually extended their amount of prep time, and took some other stipulations away that would allow us to not compensate them for missing their prep time,” Holden said. “There were things like IEP meetings, 504 meetings, field trips, things like that – that if those things were the reasons that their prep time was being encroached upon, we didn’t have to compensate them for that. We, as a board, thought that that was just not right. If we encroach on your time, we encroach on your time. It doesn’t matter what the reasonings are.”
Holden said this is the only thing the impasse rests on and he’s “fairly confident” it should be resolved quickly.
“We made such good progress on every other thing, and I think we’re pretty close,” Holden said. “Before this topic came up, I feel like we were pretty close to getting done with salary. It was just this item. And this item, we really needed an answer on because there were ties to the salary discussion within this topic.”
