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Members of the Plainfield Education Association picketing Monday evening. |
As election day approaches (it is next Tuesday) for incumbents Wilma Campbell and Frederick Moore, Sr., and their running-mate David Rutherford, teachers and support staff have taken to the streets to protest that they are now in the second year of working without a contract.
The Board has taken an unhurried pace which has left Plainfield Education Association (PEA) members chafing at the virtual reduction in take-home pay as healthcare costs continue to escalate while paychecks are frozen at the levels of the contract which expired in June 2012.
About fifty members of the PEA, which represents the district's teachers, aides and support staff, gathered outside Plainfield High School Monday evening to protest the delay.
I am told that the last bargaining session between the Board of Ed and the union was to be October 21 and that the state mediator who is helping in the negotiations was supposed to be in Plainfield Monday evening.
The Board of Ed is remaining mum on its position, but many teachers are convinced the board is stalling, hoping the union will cave.
Monday's evening's informational picket was high-spirited but polite. While several cars honked their horns in passing while I was there, the picket became less and less noticeable as dusk deepened.
What the Board of Ed has to worry about is when the teachers decide they are fed up not only with the pace of the negotiations, but with the genteel evening picket lines, and decide to picket in broad daylight while the students are on their way to school in the morning.
That would catch the eye of everyone driving to work along Park Avenue as well as creating a 'teachable moment' in democracy and fair play for the students.
Something the Board of Ed would rather not have, I'm sure.
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2 comments:
Who cares? As if Plainfield education system is so great.
Most people work without a contract and without cadillac benefits so to the teachers ... FU
So people, please keep things the way they are and vote for Campbell team. That will make things better.
Send them all packing. Remember
1-4-6. Vote line 1-4-6
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