The entrance to the offices of the Hamilton County Department of Education is seen in this photo taken on April 7, 2009.A local judge has ruled that the current negotiation conditions of a county teachers union contract must stay in place.
Chancellor Frank Brown III, issued his ruling today following a hearing Monday between the Hamilton County Education Association and Hamilton County Board of Education.
Attorneys for the board argued that recent changes by the legislature prevented "collective bargaining" and replaced it with a new method known as "collective conferencing."
The law change, board attorneys told Brown in the Monday hearing, didn't allow them to conduct annual re-negotiations on the current three-year contract set to expire in 2014.
But the association's attorney argued that the legislature intended existing contracts to remain until their expiration despite the change in law and cited a case decided in March in Dickson County involving the same issues.
The Dickson judge ruled that the contract there would continue to be negotiated using collective bargaining until it expired.
For more see tomorrow's Times Free Press.