Negotiations Update 8 & 9 May 2025

Our growing list of agenda items has necessitated multiple negotiations sessions in the last few weeks of the semester. Today’s negotiations update summarizes the work that was done on both Thursday, May 8th and Friday, May 9th.

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Priority Discussion Items

1. Ground Rules

PFF and the District reviewed our agreed-upon Ground Rules, specifically the following two sections: 

“Both parties will show appropriate preparation by:

• Having done appropriate prep work for that day’s agenda.

• Contributing to setting the agenda, which will be shared with both parties at least 1 day (24 hours) before the meeting time.

• Sending information, requested during a meeting, no later than 1 day (24 hours) prior to the next scheduled meeting, unless there are extenuating circumstances and those reasons are stated.”

&

“Both parties will acknowledge emails and information requests within 1 business day and respond in a timely manner.”

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Action Items

1. TERB Forms (District Counterproposal 1)

After last week’s frustrating delays, we were eager to see the District’s first counter proposal. Their counter included the following adjustments:

• On the Final Evaluation Report, proposed adding “including out-of-cycle” to the Tenured section and proposed striking “Out of cycle eval only” for Chair and Dean Letters thus attempting to include Dean oversight for all tenured (peer) evaluations. 

• Added “and Director” for each section of the Chair and Dean Form. 

These changes were significant, so we did not agree to sign until we had a chance to take the forms back to the TERB Coordinator and committee. 

Ultimately, we emphasized to the District that if we wanted to make progress on the changes and move toward compliance, we would need to agree to a compromise this semester. PFF’s proposal includes more Dean involvement in the evaluation process, but we have reservations about adding Dean oversight for all areas of evaluation. PFF maintains that the assessment of our learning environments remains under the purview of faculty. 

There was a great deal of discussion about how the new forms would operate alongside the current Article 17, which includes Dean letters for some evaluations. They would both be in effect until Article 17 is open, which would occur as soon as we finalize this round of reopeners. This means that while the Chair and Dean Form is intended to replace the Chair and Dean letters, both the forms and the letters would be in effect until changes are agreed upon when Article 17 is renegotiated. 

2. Time-Sensitive MOU_Math Retention Coordinator (District Proposal)

We agreed on an MOU for a new Title V/HSI Math Retention Faculty Lead position to be jointly appointed by the Faculty Senate and the District, with 60% reassigned time in 2025–26 and 40% in 2026–27.

3. MOU_AI Literacy (District Counterproposal 1)

After some discussion on the selection process for the participants in this grant work, the District and PFF agreed on the MOU with the understanding that future grants need to follow the language of 15.7 so that we can avoid MOUs for grant work. 

Notably, the District did not share their initial proposals for Article 4 and 16 as well as their third counterproposal for Article 20. 

We had many discussion items that we could not get through on May 8th and May 9th due to the discussions around the agenda items. But we did plant flags about two potential negotiated items that would be discussed publicly: support to fill classified vacancies in ASL interpreting in order to better support our Deaf faculty and an employee certificate with pre-approved classes that could be applied to salary grade advancement. 

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Next Meeting: Thursday, May 15th

Signing off—but still here for every comma, clause, and cause.

Your Negotiations Team