MARYSVILLE — After four fruitless days of court-ordered mediation, striking teachers and the Marysville School District will find out this morning if a judge will order teachers back to work.
Meanwhile, a team appointed by Gov. Gary Locke to look for solutions to the longest teachers’ strike in state history applied pressure to both sides Sunday by recommending they consider binding arbitration. The two-man panel also recommended teachers go to work and get the school year going for the district’s 11,000 students while they continue to bargain.
"There’s lots of blame to go around," said the panel’s Denny Heck. Both sides are not doing their jobs, he said. "At the end of the day, they’ve failed. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s intolerable and inexcusable."
On Wednesday, Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Linda Krese ordered the two sides to negotiate for at least eight hours a day from Thursday through Sunday. A parents group and the school district have asked her to approve an injunction ordering teachers back to the classroom.
Unproductive is how both sides described the talks, which ended about 7:30 p.m. Sunday.
"They never intended to offer a fair contract," said Elaine Hanson, president of the 650-member Marysville Education Association. "We challenge the (school) board to return to the bargaining table and immediately negotiate in earnest instead of in the bogus and shameful manner they did this weekend."
"There was no significant movement," said Judy Parker, a school district spokeswoman. "We bargained in good faith from the beginning."
Locke’s two-man team, in its five-page report, bluntly took both sides to task for prolonging the strike.
Locke’s "special masters," Heck, a former state lawmaker, and Bob Utter, a retired Washington Supreme Court justice, recommended that both sides compromise. Teachers should get an overall pay raise, but not as much as the 7.5 percent increase, over three years, that the union has been asking for, they said. The pair did not recommend a specific amount of a pay raise, although they did point out a few ways the district could save money and apply it to the raise.
Heck said the district took too hard a line about the state schedule and how teachers are paid in local money for work they perform beyond the 180-day school year. The district has proposed shifting from a locally negotiated salary schedule to a state schedule for the portion of teachers’ salaries that come from state tax money.
"The district has tried to get back a lot very quickly," Heck said. "Perhaps a more deliberative method would have been more effective. There’s nothing magic about that state schedule."
The report said the district "has been too ambitious" in its negotiations in those two areas, which helped prolong the strike.
If no compromise can be reached quickly through negotiations, Heck and Utter recommended both sides submit to binding interest-arbitration, which is sometimes used with police and firefighter labor disputes. The state’s Public Employment Relations Commission would be able to handle the arbitration for Marysville, according to the report.
In an interview, Heck added that arbitration could be done in a day or two.
In binding interest-arbitration, a professional mediator talks to both sides, then negotiates a compromise and that compromise becomes binding.
The school district had justifiable financial reasons to be frugal in its approach to negotiations, the report said. It found that Marysville teachers are among the highest paid in the state, and finances are tight in the district.
Heck and Utter also recommended that the school district should get to direct one or more additional days of training for their teachers.
Currently, the district controls the training for two days, and roughly eight more days are essentially reported by teachers as compensation time for extra unpaid work they put in.
The compromise would be that teachers would get to keep those eight days instead of having them replaced by the more district-controlled training.
The school district could save $248,000 per year, because the report recommends reducing the per diem pay for that extra day.
"I firmly believe that with these suggestions, reasonable people operating in good faith can reach agreement — and reach that agreement fairly quickly," Utter said.
Both the teachers’ union and the district said the report bolstered their arguments. They also disagreed on some of its meanings.
Hanson latched onto wording in the report that says, "The parties can and should negotiate a new single consolidated salary schedule that meets as many of the stated interests of both sides as possible." To her, that means a locally bargained contract.
"I’m not willing to interpret it that way," said Parker, the district spokeswoman.
"We certainly believe they understood we have the strained financial resources and that they agreed we need a different salary schedule and we need more professional training" based on test scores, Parker said.
Utter and Heck said the two sides need to get students back to school soon.
"Enough is enough. The students and staff (on both sides) and community have suffered too much," the report said. "It is time to move forward and reopen schools. We are confident that if the parties are truly willing to compromise, an agreement is altogether possible."
Today, Krese is expected to decide whether to approve the injunction, ordering teachers back to the classroom. Teachers could face fines of up to $250 a day under sanctions suggested in court papers if the injunction is granted.
A parents’ group, Tired Of The Strike, originally sought the injunction in a lawsuit against the district and the teachers’ union. The district later filed court papers to join in the injunction request.
The district said it will wait for Krese’s ruling before trying to determine a starting date for school.
If an injunction is granted, Marysville teachers could gather in a general membership meeting as early as tonight to decide what to do next, Hanson said.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or stevick@heraldnet.com.
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