Ideas to Rebuild Your Relationship With Teachers

Many public school districts experienced tough contract negotiations and strikes during the past decade. Gone are the "family" relationships in which teachers palyed fawning children to board members and the superintendent who played roles as benevolent parents.

During the decade, strong professional teachers' unions demanded involvement in decision-making. Teachers began looking to themselves, collectively in unions, for their professional identity and their power base. Management reacted by getting tougher and forcing authoritarian relationships to work.

The resultant hatred, isolation and formalistic "compliance with the letter of the contract relationships" currently exist in many school districts.

Cathartic Start

In the Perrysburg, Ohio, Public Schools, icy relationships following a near-strike flourished for roughly 18 months before problems were addressed. Time healed no wounds.

Sniping at one another through the local newspapers eroded public confidence in the school board and the faculty. A note from the superintendent to the board members captured the dilemma: Our perception of ourselves as being good and benevolent may be shared only by us. If so, we 'gotta' change."

Having emotionally confronted its own contributions to the bitter relationships, management invited the union's entire executive committee to a structured, professionally led confrontation with all board members and administrators. This all-day and evening session was painful and cathartic. Out of it, a structured framework for open communication and involvement emerged.

Creating Channels

The Perrysburg Educators' Rumor Control Team, referred to as the PERC Team, became the vehicle through which board members, administrators, and teachers could voice concerns and challenges in regular, structured meetings.

Unwittingly, the group's purpose closely approximated that of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services' labor-management committees, which serve as an ongoing forum for dealing proactively with common problems.

The board of education and the teachers' union decided to include representatives of non-teaching employees. Stated goals included: (1) improving communication among certified and classified staffs, the administration, and board members; (2) preventing and controlling rumors; and (3) disseminating information to all school employees and board members.

No group can control the committee arbitrarily. The PERC Team includes two board members, two administrators, two teachers' union executive committee members, two classified staff members, and up to four elected representatives from buildings not represented by a teacher or classified staff member in the original eight. Each serves a staggered two-year term. Initial terms were for one or two years.

The superintendent serves as an ex-officio member. This "resource person" role prohibits administrative domination or intimidation.

A presider, assistant presider, and recorder are elected by a majority vote of the PERC Team at its initial annual meeting and serve for that year only. The superintendent may proofread but not edit minutes, which are distributed to all board members and personnel.

The presider calls monthly meetings and chooses a location. The agenda for each meeting is set spontaneously by team members who raise questions submitted by their constituents (e.g., board members may ask questions raised by citizens or other board members, teachers raise questions emanating from their buildings, and bus drivers ask about ideas generated by classified staff).

Issues to be discussed, questions to be answered, and rumors to be controlled are solicited in two ways. Team members ask their peers about concerns, and suggestion forms are available in each school office. Answers are made public or kept confidential, depending on the person's wishes.

A Quiet Trust

The human predilection to base personal satisfaction on the assurance that no one else in the organization receives preferential treatment is alive and well. The PERC committee makes public the differences and forces administrative re-examination of practices.

PERC has addressed and answered dozens of issues in its first four years. Most issues concerned work arrangements. Examples include determining the location of special education classes, selecting members of interview teams when new teachers are to be hired, and specifying when teachers must arrive at work on snow delay days. Predictably, the issue of whether people in any building may use school phones for personal calls surfaced repeatedly.

Some issues prompted self policing by the teachers or their union. A teacher's routine of cancelling home-work for students who bought Girl Scout cookies offended other teachers, and the practice was stopped. Similarly, concern that some staff members used school phones during the work day to sell real estate drew indignation from peers. Publicized, the practice stopped.

Other questions simply sought information. How long does it take to process reimbursement for professional travel? When will new health insurance-benefit description booklets be available?

Several times, meetings were dismissed because no one had questions or rumors. A quiet trust grew. The management team's authoritarian style changed, as did the union's combative, confrontational tactics.

Risky Business.

These happy outcomes were not foregone conclusions.

At the outset, everyone who was involved felt threatened by the PERC Team.

Teachers feared retribution for serving on the committee. Union leaders may have taken the greatest risk--they abandoned on faith the confrontational approach that had been successful in negotiations, and they risked being perceived by their members as "being in bed with the [hated] administration."

Principals feared that their every decision would be critically misstated in front of two board members and the superintendent by the whiniest teacher in the building. The superintendent publicly justified all decisions, thus risking personal attack by disgruntled employees, and conceded that the district operated less harmoniously and efficiently than board members believed. Finally, board members lost their relative anonymity and the excuse of being uninformed or misinformed.

Board members said the task of evaluating the superintendent became easier and more accurate. Information came to them from the PERC Team without the filter of administrative interpretation.

Teachers felt their professional status was improved because mundane chores were eliminated. Union leaders and administrators learned that communication and trust spill over to the bargaining table--structuring a process in which no secrets are possible diminishes the potential for misunderstanding. Administrators experienced a renewed commonness of purpose with the staff.

New Protection

Labor-management relations control the effectiveness of schools. More important than the number of dollars put on the table during bargaining, labor-management committees create direct involvement in the operation of the district by people w o plan and deliver opportunities for children.

Old relationships have died. New relationships are under construction in this structured, protected setting.

Joe Bailey previously served as superintendent in Perrysburg, Ohio.

COPYRIGHT 1995 American Association of School Administrators
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group