After more than a year of aggressive campaigning from the Durham Association of Educators (DAE), the Durham school board approved North Carolina’s first ever meet and confer policy in a surprise 4-3 vote on Thursday night.
The policy approval, which gives the DAE input on district decisions without violating North Carolina’s laws against public sector collective bargaining, was a historic win for organized labor in the anti-union South. But in a Pyrrhic twist, it landed like a loss for the DAE, the district’s majority union whose members stormed out of the board room immediately after the vote.
“After months of thousands of workers being a part of a process, eight people decided on a final policy and totally left workers out of that process,” DAE president Mika Twietmeyer told INDY outside of the Durham Public Schools building.
The disagreement was over just one number, which the DAE and Superintendent Anthony Lewis have been haggling over for months: The percentage of membership necessary for other unions to win seats at the meet and confer table alongside DAE and administrators.
The board’s attorneys advised that they keep that membership requirement low, in order to avoid violating a state law that prohibits the board from giving any one employee group “preferential treatment” through policy (Asheville City Schools’ superintendent recently adopted a meet and confer procedure, which the superintendent can carry out without board approval and thus lacks the permanence of policy).
At Thursday’s meeting, Lewis presented a draft that would give other organizations a seat if they could demonstrate they represent at least 6 percent of non-administrative staff. The DAE’s draft called for 30 percent. No DPS organization other than DAE has demonstrated enough support to reach either of those thresholds.
The board ordinarily views draft policies at two meetings before voting on them, and most board members seemed ready to step back and let Lewis and the DAE come back with an agreement on that number. (During a recess in the proceedings, Lewis even pulled a chair up in front of Twietmeyer and quietly asked if she would be willing to meet again. Twietmeyer agreed, as long as the meetings would be part of the public record.)
But the board still haggled over that number for 40 minutes until veteran board member Natalie Beyer made the surprise move to call the policy for a vote without a later second reading. Beyer was the most persistent in arguing for keeping the threshold to six percent, as strongly suggested by the board’s attorney. She pointed out that the board, and its attorney, would ultimately be the ones to answer to the state for any broken laws.
“We didn’t write it, we don’t like it,” Beyer said of the state law. “But we are trying to give a win to our education association.”
Board members, caught off guard, sat and processed Beyer’s motion for 14 seconds before Millicent Rogers moved to second it.
Beyer and Rogers were clearly frustrated with a process that has consistently been tense, but has only recently turned truly contentious. Beyer specifically mentioned a March meeting between the superintendent and the DAE, at which a room of over 100 red-shirted educators hissed and jeered at the superintendent as he sat at table with over a dozen DAE representatives.
Even board member Joy Harrell Goff, who spoke in support of the DAE policy at the beginning of that meeting, called the later parts of the encounter “very uncomfortable,” and “not our best moment.”
Since that meeting, communications have continued to break down as the DAE and members of the board have invited each other to more meetings while declining the other’s invitations.
In late March, the DAE invited board members to public meetings later in April. A few days after that invitation, the board invited the DAE for an hour-long budget talk at this week’s Wednesday budget hearing. But the DAE didn’t show up on Wednesday, and only three board members have indicated that they will accept the DAE’s invitation next week.
INDY has also viewed district records that show that most board members missed at least one recent email from the DAE because the district’s security system flagged the mass-comminqués as suspicious.
As Thursday’s meeting dragged on, the number of DAE members in the audience dwindled until only about 20 remained to silently watch as board members bartered over that membership threshold. After an hour of this, Beyer reminded her colleagues that the policy could still be edited after it was approved.
“It is putting something in place that gets this moving, and can be modified in the future as all policies can,” she said.
Harrell Goff, Emily Chávez, and Wendell Tabb voted no. Tabb had repeatedly urged members to “trust the process” by sending Lewis to meet with DAE again, and even made a last-ditch effort to try to get Beyer to rescind her motion for a vote.
Beyer, Rogers, and Bettina Umstead voted yes, joined by Jessia Carda-Auten in a surprise shift.
Carda-Auten had previously spoken in support of DAE’s version of the policy, including at that heated March meeting, and made several attempts—including a failed amendment to the draft—on Thursday to raise the board’s percentage figure closer to the DAE’s. It wasn’t immediately clear why she voted for the policy with the six percent threshold.
The board then went into closed session. No members were available for comment Thursday night.
Outside the downtown DPS headquarters around 11 p.m., the DAE huddled to try to figure out what to do at the end of an exhausting process that won them nearly everything they asked for, but may have shown the limits of their influence.
Under the approved policy, the meet and confer sessions will start in October. Will the DAE, as the district’s only currently eligible organization, attend those meetings? Or will they push for a change to the policy?
“Our members will decide how to proceed,” Twietmeyer told INDY after the huddle.
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.