On Tuesday, September 25th, the Lennox School Board unanimously approved Part 2 of the Tentative Agreement, ratified by the teachers of Lennox two weeks earlier, bringing to a close negotiations for this year.  We have a contract, folks.  It’s not perfect, we didn’t get everything that was important to us, but achieved our most important objectives – maintaining class sizes, saving jobs, and getting some relief from the ever increasing workload pushed on us by the district.

So what’s next?  The election, plain and simple.  If Prop 30 and/or Prop 38 pass, we sit down with the district and start looking carefully at the district’s budget in preparation for re-opening some non-compensation parts of the contract in January 2013.  But if Prop 30 and Prop 38 fail, when we sit down with the district in November, it will be to start talking about additional furlough days and salary cuts in 2013-2014, beyond those we’ve already agreed to.  That would be bad.  So let’s make sure it doesn’t happen.

Phone banking has already begun at the CTA offices and many of you have already participated.  But many of you haven’t yet.  This is the time to take all that amazing energy everyone had last spring and unleash it on the election to make sure Prop 30 passes (and to defeat Prop 32 while we’re at it).  So, please, if you haven’t done phone banking yet, contact your Site Rep and sign up!  We need your participation as much now as we did last spring.