Sandy HughesCollective bargaining has gone away for Hamilton County public school teachers, but the teachers’ union that’s been here for decades still will represent the school district’s employees under the new “collaborative conferencing” process to negotiate pay and benefits.
The Hamilton County Education Association won all the seats at the negotiating table in a three-day electronic vote that ended at 7 p.m. Thursday.
“It’s a joyful time,” HCEA President Sandy Hughes said Friday morning. “I felt that we had the support of the teachers.”
The union wants teachers to get raises, so its officials will be watching this spring when the school district makes its budget, Hughes said.
The results of the process — which remain to be seen at this point — will conclude in a memorandum of understanding that the school board will vote on. The Tennessee General Assembly in 2011 did away with collective bargaining, but the changes didn’t take effect here until this summer, when Hamilton County’s three-year contract expired.
“It’s not as good as collective bargaining,” Hughes said. “Now the school board could throw out the [memorandum] and pick and choose. One would think they wouldn’t make those kinds of changes — but it could be done.”
A total of 1,712 votes were cast by the 3,179 eligible professional employees, including teachers, librarians and guidance counselors.
Of those, 1,690 voted to engage in collaborative conferencing, while 22 voted not to. That met the threshold of 1,591 — or more than half the employees — to start the process.
The teachers’ union got 1,549 votes, or just more than 90 percent. The Professional Educators of Tennessee, a Nashville-area group that describes itself as a nonpartisan teachers’ association, got 143, or about 8 percent — which was below the 15 percent required to get a seat at the table.
“A lot of the … voting has to do with how strong the local [union] is,” said Samantha Bates, PET’s director of member services. “But we’re growing in Chattanooga. We also have a great relationship with the school board members and the superintendent there.”
Other choices on the electronic ballot were “unaffiliated,” which received 17 votes, and “none of the above,” which got three votes.
There were some glitches with the electronic voting. Employees used a randomly generated number that they received via their school district email. But the district’s email server crashed briefly Thursday afternoon. And the electronic ballots weren’t sent until about 9:25 a.m. Tuesday morning, instead of 8:30 a.m. as planned. So voting was extended until 7 p.m. Thursday, instead of 5 p.m. as initially stated.
Hughes said some employees couldn’t cut and paste their randomly generated numbers into the ballot to activate it.
Kirk Kelly, the school district’s director of accountability and testing, who handled the technical aspects of the vote, said that cutting and pasting may not have worked on smartphones, but it did on computers.
“Depending on your computer skills, you could cut and paste,” Kelly said.
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/tim.omarzu or twitter.com/TimOmarzu or 423-757-6651.