Joint Committee Meeting

The negotiated Joint Committee had its first meeting of the 2011-2012 year.  Serving on the committee for JEA are Melissa Brown, Negotiations Chairperson; Cindy Carroll, Jordan UniServ Director; and me.  On the District side, Dr. Patsi Johnson, Superintendent; Dr. June LeMaster, Human Resources Director; and Dr. Anthony Godfrey, Administrator of Schools.

Dr. Johnson started by saying that she had met with the Utah School Boards Association and Utah School Superintendents Association.  Both groups are looking at supporting nine proposed bills in the next legislative session.  Eight of the nine are about restoring financing, with one of those providing five professional development days.  When the legislative session begins in January, watch for information on these and other bills to support.

Laura Finlison, Curriculum Director, reviewed the professional development tentatively planned throughout the year for the Common Core.  Watch for information on the classes applying to you.  Some classes will be offered after school at no charge, but unpaid.  A couple of Saturdays are scheduled where you would be paid inservice rate to attend a 6 hour training with an hour for lunch.

Bevan Wasden, Administrator of Schools, scheduled the first meeting of the Elementary Preparation Time Task Force.  Watch for an e-mail for volunteers to serve.

Dave Stoddard, Administrator of Schools, came in to talk about high school parent teacher conferences.  We have the data from the survey last spring to analyze.  We are also going to look at models from around the nation.  The goal is not to eliminate PTC, but to restructure it so more parents attend.

Finally, we talked about Interest Based Bargaining (IBB) training.  Dr. Johnson was trained in IBB in Nevada.  We are going to bring more information about the length and cost of the training to our next meeting.  The training would be sometime during the year with a new form of negotiations starting in 2012.