September 12th

A very interesting class today. Even though I thought our group was fairly well prepared to choose the items we wanted to negotiate, once we started the discussion and looked at different angles of various articles, the process was much longer than expected. When you have three people from three different districts bringing the experiences and perspectives from those districts, it is amazing how many flaws you can find in a contract. The same goes for the Brave New World exercise with Jerry in the afternoon. Judging from the many opinions and deep thinking that went into who we would pick for survivors, Interest Based Bargaining could create quite an interesting format for collective bargaining. Our superintendent wants our district to go to IBB next year after several very controversial and heated bargaining sessions this past spring. I have never been involved in collective bargaining at our school on either side, but if we go to IBB I would love to watch the process unfold.