Tacoma’s public schools will be closed for a fourth day Tuesday as an ongoing dispute over teacher pay creates the state’s largest work stoppage of educators.
The Tacoma Education Association, which represents teachers, declined the district’s request for binding arbitration, the district wrote in an email update Monday night. “Both sides remain far apart at the bargaining table,” the district said.
Over the weekend, the school district filed a request for fact-finding and arbitration with the state’s Public Employment Relations Commission, according to a statement posted on the district’s website. The commission’s recommendations would be nonbinding. Dan Voelpel, a spokesman for Tacoma Public Schools, said the district wants to “operate from the same set of facts” in its talks with the teachers.
“We had just finished nine days of mediation with not much progress,” Voelpel said on Monday. The teachers union “is still demanding high-double-digit pay increases, but we are hoping to bring an end to this as soon as possible. We think we need to clearly demonstrate it’s not a lack of willingness to pay, but a lack of ability, as we did not receive the windfall of cash that other districts had.”
Across Washington, teacher contract negotiations have been particularly fraught after lawmakers this year injected about $1 billion into the state’s K-12 budget to pay for educator salaries. The infusion of cash prompted the Washington state Supreme Court to close the decadelong school-finance case known as McCleary. But the extra money also automatically opened teacher contracts for renegotiation in virtually all of the state’s 295 school districts.
Angel Morton, president of the Tacoma Education Association, the teachers union, called the district’s fact-finding and arbitration request a “stall tactic.”
“We lost two whole days of negotiations over the weekend,” Morton said on Monday. “It is just a way to keep schools closed, and they are harming their own students. My teachers are not going back if they don’t have a competitive wage because they are holding out for the money. We are not being greedy; we are just asking for what’s ours.”
Tacoma’s public school district is the fourth-biggest in Washington, with an enrollment of more than 29,000 students, or 2.6 percent of the state’s total, according to official data. When combined with ongoing teacher strikes in Battle Ground, Centralia and Tumwater, the holdouts in the four districts have impacted more than 53,000 students, just under half of whom come from low-income households.
The Centralia School District struck a tentative agreement with educators Monday night, according to the Centralia Education Association. Centralia schools will remain closed Tuesday. Union members will vote on the tentative agreement Tuesday at 8 a.m., said Washington Education Association spokesman Rich Wood.
