photo by: Lawrence Journal-World

The Lawrence school board will meet on Monday, August 26, 2024 at the Lawrence district offices, 110 McDonald Dr.

Changes to the schedules at Lawrence middle schools have resulted in frustration among teachers who believe they no longer have adequate collaboration time to work together on making their schools better.

The changes also may have resulted in a violation of the labor agreement the district has with the Lawrence Education Association. A teacher, a union leader and at least one school board member are now contending the changes have violated the master labor agreement the district has with its teachers.

At issue is an overall reduction of 90 minutes of weekly planning time from the schedule of middle school teachers. More specifically, 32 minutes of “collaboration time” have been eliminated from the schedule and that is what has some teachers and school board member G.R. Gordon-Ross contending that the district is now out of compliance with the master agreement between teachers and the district.

Gordon-Ross said the collaboration time is a special type of planning time that is particularly important for the overall health of schools.

“What we lost with the current schedule this year is that the collaboration time isn’t as robust and basically nonexistent,” Gordon-Ross told the Journal-World. “Those collaboration minutes function very differently than other planning minutes. That time is very much ‘I’m planning for what I’m teaching,’ and collaboration is, ‘I’m working with my peers on how to best serve my students.'”

Some teachers are saying the loss of such collaboration time is coming at a particularly bad moment due to cuts to district teaching staff that have led to larger class sizes.

“The concern from a teacher’s perspective is that with cuts to teaching positions, the number of students in classes went up — and you’re also having less time for planning,” said Liberty Memorial Central Middle School teacher Josh Spradlin.

The larger class sizes are a direct result of staffing reductions that saw 48 secondary teaching positions eliminated for the current school year. Spradlin believes the middle school schedule, approved at the board’s March 27 meeting, is not compliant with the school district/LEA master agreement for the 2023-24 school year.

LEA President Emerson Hoffzales also believes the schedule is out of compliance with the agreement. Hoffzales told the Journal-World that the collaborative minutes provide time for vital discussion on the topic of cross-curricular content, and even areas such as the social-emotional well-being of students.

“So English and math teachers can work together to decide what they need to better support students,” Hoffzales said. “We would like to see that dedicated collaboration time increase for our middle school teachers.”

Middle school teachers previously had specific time set aside at the end of the day on Wednesdays to collaborate. The district’s master labor agreement calls for collaboration time of 90 minutes per week. But the master agreement doesn’t set the actual schedules of individual schools. That’s done through separate processes. The middle school schedule that ultimately was crafted resulted in 32 minutes of collaboration time on Wednesdays being removed from the schedule. Those minutes have now been reallocated to general planning time, which was necessary, district officials contend, in order to meet provisions in the master agreement related to general planning time.

A reduction in prep-time minutes, which is given to teachers at the beginning and end of school days for organizational purposes, coupled with the drop in collaborative planning time, has resulted in a 90-minute overall loss in weekly planning time.

“The collaboration time at the end of the day on Wednesdays was reduced, and I feel like we’re not able to accomplish as much as we did when we had more time,” Spradlin said.

Approval questions

Gordon-Ross said that a presentation at the March 27 school board meeting by Patrick Kelly, the district’s chief academic officer, did not provide the board with a full picture of planning minutes for the district’s four middle schools.

Gordon-Ross said he now believes the plan-time component of the schedule is not compliant with the master agreement.

“It was presented to the board as meeting the master agreement (requirements for plan-time minutes), and then approved by the board,” Gordon-Ross said. “And subsequently, it was discovered that it did not meet the master agreement requirements.”

At the March 27 meeting, board member Kelly Jones said she felt it was of “pressing” concern that the board make a decision on the middle school schedule that night. Gordon-Ross told the Journal-World that “We were kind of backed into a corner of ‘either we do this, or we don’t have a contract.'”

The board ultimately voted 4-3 to approve recommendations related to middle school curriculum changes, which included a discussion about the new middle school schedule.

Gordon-Ross voted for the changes, but now says board members weren’t given correct information about how the schedule would reduce the amount of collaboration time available to middle school teachers. He told the Journal-World that the loss of those minutes “is an unintended consequence of the schedule that we enacted, and are now actively trying to fix.”

photo by: Contributed

Patrick Kelly

Kelly said he didn’t agree with any assertion that he presented erroneous information to the board. He said he believes it was clear that the information he presented to the board was “a draft schedule to provide some context for possible curriculum changes,” and not a recommendation for the schedule itself.

He said he worked with multiple stakeholders to develop the actual middle school schedule, and stopped short of agreeing with assertions that the schedule wasn’t compliant with the master agreement.

“I worked with a number of principals to develop that schedule,” Kelly told the Journal-World. “And we used the negotiated agreement as a guideline.”

As for whether schedules will change in the future, and more collaboration time will be added either this year or next year, discussions are underway between the district and the union, but it is difficult to predict any results.

“Schedules and plan-time are determined through a negotiated agreement process, and I’m not going to negotiate through the newspaper,” Kelly said.

Jones told the Journal-World on Friday that discussions about the schedule that are currently being had are focused on how the issue can be addressed for the next school year. Changes to this school year aren’t likely feasible, she said.

“That would be disruptive to the class schedule,” Jones said. “Right now, the conversation is about the contract for next year, and I personally have not heard a request to change it right now.”

The ongoing discussion is part of certified negotiations and will again be an agenda item for the certified negotiation team’s next meeting on Feb. 1.

Jones said she does expect the school board and district administrators to make improvements with how they bargain with the teachers going forward. Jones said she does think Kelly and his team “provided the best information they could at the time” when they explained the schedule issues to the board.

But Jones also said the process wasn’t ideal.

“I think under the circumstances of the budget cuts, there was a lot of pressure to respond to a lot of moving parts,” she said.

Jones added that the school board and the district’s Executive Leadership Team “could have done better in verifying that we were working within the interest-based bargaining process.”

“So my takeaway from the experience related to the middle school schedule is that the board has to practice the IBB process with fidelity,” Jones said. “And I don’t think that under the pressures of the budget cuts, that we did that in this case.”