No deal reached to end Portland Public Schools strike

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - The administration of Portland Public Schools gave an update Monday morning following rumors of an agreement being reached with teachers.

According to PPS, at this time no agreement has been reached.

I want to be clear that our board did not reject a proposal, and there was not a tentative agreement in place. The bargaining teams were working on a package settlement proposal fo the last 24hrs. Our PS bargaining team brought a conceptual proposal to the 3 board members at the bargaining table for our consideration. There were many positive parts of the proposal that addressed planning time, cola, health and safety, and mental health supports. While there were many things in the proposal that we could agree on there were also some fundamental issues specifically around parents having the ability to make educational decisions about other people’s children that we could not agree on. This is what needs to be worked out and we were expecting to work through those concerns today in order get our kids back in school on the 27th, I want to be explicitly clear that this is the core obstacle to our arriving at a conceptual agreement
PPS Chair Gary Hollands

According to the administration, PPS and the Union had agreed on a 13.8% cumulative cost of living increase (6.25% the first year, 4% the second year, 3% the third year). The school district emphasizes over 50% of educators would have earned over $100,000 per year by the third year of the contract.

“We desperately want kids back in the classroom,” said Julia Brim-Edwards with the Portland Public Schools Board of Education. “We know they want to get back into the classroom. We know teachers want them to be back again. We feel like we can close the gap.”

Portland teachers and the school district were still at the bargaining table Friday, which means the strike is stretching into the Thanksgiving holiday break.

The latest update from Portland Public Schools said they’ve reached tentative agreements on four items including retirement and academic freedom and are still discussing items like pay and class sizes.

The strike has been underway since Nov. 1 and is the first teacher strike in Portland Public Schools’ history. The district is the state’s largest, with over 45,000 students.

A statement was given to Fox 12 from the Portland Association of Teachers about today’s developments, “We have a transformational deal between the PAT and PPS bargaining team, where both sides moved towards shared goals bringing improvements to Portland schools, that the PPS school board yanked this deal out from under us, and extended the strike, displays an unprecedented failure of leadership.”

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