For over a year, the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) has been pushing for a so-called meet and confer policy, seeking to give workers more of a role in district-wide decisions. The DAE has argued that a lack of worker input on policy contributed to the district’s recent successive pay and transit crises.
North Carolina law bans public sector collective bargaining, but the DAE has pitched “meet and confer” as a way for workers to give input. Since December, Superintendent Anthony Lewis and the DAE have agreed on nearly everything in the policy, but continued to haggle over a few small but key areas.
This month, the board abruptly decided to adopt a version of the policy (which differed slightly from the DAE’s version), making Durham the first district in North Carolina to approve such a policy (Asheville City Schools gets an honorable mention for recently adopting a similar procedure, which lacks the permanence of policy).
But what even is meet and confer? Who is meeting and what are they conferring about? We dig into the newly adopted DPS board policy 7215 and what it means for workers.
What is meet and confer?
The policy forms an advisory committee to the school board made up of workers (via employee representative organizations (EROs) and district administration.
The meet and confer policy is designed to give workers some input on policy and the budget without violating the state’s ban on collective bargaining between government agencies and their public sector employees.
The committee will meet seven times a year, and each session will not exceed two hours. The meetings will be open to the public.
What power does the meet and confer committee have?
The committee will have no official power.
Durham voters elect members of the school board, which has ultimate legal responsibility for district policy and budget decisions. The board adopted the meet and confer policy, and could edit or undo it at basically any time.
A cynical viewer could certainly argue that the DAE has fought for a policy with no mechanism to directly effectuate change. But meet and confer gives the largest ERO an opportunity to make policy recommendations to the superintendent. And, if the superintendent approves, the committee may present that recommendation to the board for consideration.
The policy may also solve some organizational issues—the DAE and Lewis have recently played a messy game of telephone, disagreeing over who invited whom to meet when, and who said what when, and board members have missed DAE emails due to system security. The public meetings will level the informational playing field, create a public record of conversations, and give the EROs a forum to collaborate with, and perhaps occasionally challenge, the district’s administration.
Early in the push, the DAE argued that “meet and confer would create a context for an employee representative organization, like DAE, to regularly collaborate with administration to improve our schools. It would allow union members to bring the combined wisdom of thousands of passionate, talented school staff into the conversation with district administration to better understand our students’ greatest needs and find solutions that are not possible when on-the-ground educators are left out of decision-making.”
Who is on the committee?
The superintendent or deputy superintendent will be the chair, and the president or vice president of the largest ERO will be the vice chair.
An ERO with over 50 percent membership can appoint up to 13 workers to the committee. The policy says the superintendent “may” appoint up to 13 members, who “may” include five administrators, three site-level administrators (principals), and up to five other employees (including administrators, managers, and supervisors).
Previously, the DAE had argued that Lewis should be required to bring only administrators and managers—the use of “may” in the current policy could give the superintendent more discretion in who he appoints.
Other EROs may win seats on the committee by reaching a 6 percent membership threshold, meaning they represent around 300 employees or more. Six percent would get them two seats, 10 percent would get them four, all the way up to 13 seats with 50 percent membership. Currently, the DAE is the only organization with anything above six percent.
That membership threshold was the major difference between DAE’s preferred version of the policy and the one ultimately passed by board members. The DAE had pushed for a higher minimum threshold for recognition, arguing that 6 percent membership could allow for another organization to gain seats and then derail the meetings. Lewis, and some members of the board, have said that higher thresholds could exclude more groups and therefore violate the state’s law against giving any one employee group preferential treatment.
What could go wrong?
The policy leaves a lot of room for anyone, whether worker or administrator, to ruin the purpose of the committee by grandstanding, boycotting, or just generally working in bad faith. The policy, for instance, doesn’t require the superintendent to bring the committee’s recommendations to the board, or even attend the meetings.
“Good faith” isn’t mentioned in the policy, but it will be an implicit tenet if anyone wants to get anything done and not just waste 14 hours a year.
What are the remaining issues to address?
The DAE has said they “will not stop fighting” until the six percent membership threshold is raised. The DAE is also hoping to change the mechanism of verifying union membership—the policy, as proposed by the superintendent and adopted by the board—would require EROs to “submit notarized certification of its member rolls to the Superintendent” for verification. That was a change from earlier drafts.
“This is a violation of employee privacy, and is not an accepted practice in the labor movement,” the DAE said in a statement. “Third-party verification of ERO membership is a common sense norm.”
If board members agree, amending the verification method may be on the agenda at the April 24 board meeting.
Do we have to say “meet and confer committee” every time?
The full name of the committee would be the “Durham Public Schools Meet and Confer Committee on Employee Relations.” Yawn.
The policy, in just two spots, uses “M&C Committee.” How about MaCC? MCC?? We don’t have the answer to this one but if someone with authority coins a name, we’ll consider it.
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.