Collective Bargaining: A History So Far

Alex's Pen
Jan 26, 2024
5 min read

Introduction

One of the biggest issues facing Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) today is educator retention. Over the last few years many talented educators have left ACPS to the surrounding school districts.

Some of the notable departures include:

Former Executive Principal of ACHS Pete Balas (1)
Former Mt. Vernon Principal and 2023 Washington Post's Principal of the Year Liza Burrell-Aldana (2)
Former Geroge Washington (2014-2022) Principal Jesse Mazur (3)

There are more educators who have left due to a laundry list of reasons like the loyalty penalty, the top-down approach utilized by ACPS leadership, and more.

Clearly, workplace culture and staff retention is a problem and one of the best ways for us to address this problem is to give our employees the best compensation package; and one of the best ways to ensure employees have a robust compensation package is to give them collective bargaining rights (4).

I won't get into too many details here, but in short collective bargaining enables employees to demand higher wages, better benefits, and improvements to workplace conditions (5, 6, 7). The best states in the US for public education have given their employees collective bargaining rights and if we do the same for our employees, we will take advantage of the benefits as well (8, 9, 10). If you would like to read further feel free to click on the links in our reference area!

However, collective bargaining is a long, complex process and many of you are just now tuning in. Many steps have already been taken to get us into this position, and this article is here to help get you caught up on how exactly we got here.

Timeline of Events so Far

Below is a timeline of events related to collective bargaining in Alexandria:

May 1, 2021 - Virginia amends their laws to allow local municipalities to give their public education and other public sector employees collective bargaining. (11)
December 2, 2021 - ACPS adopts a resolution to formally begin researching the information needed to eventually adopt collective bargaining for ACPS educators. (12)
April 17, 2021 - Alexandria City Council adopts the Public Employee Collective Bargaining Ordinance giving public sector employees the right to collective bargaining. (13)
November 2022 - Alexandria Police have their collective bargaining agreement ratified by the City of Alexandria. (14)
January 2023 - Alexandria Firefighters have their collective bargaining agreement ratified by the City of Alexandria. (15)
May 25, 2023 - ACPS School Board attends a training session on collective bargaining with outside council. (16)
October 16, 2023 - EAA officially submits an affidavit to the ACPS School Board certifying that an adequate number of ACPS employees have shown support through collective bargaining. ACPS School Board has 120 days (deadline of February 13, 2024) to respond to the question of "Will ACPS employees have collective bargaining?" (17)
October 17, 2023 - School Board convenes a collective bargaining committee consisting of Chairperson Michelle Rief, Abdel-Rhaman Elnoubi, Megan Alderton, and Ashly Simpson-Baird. (18)
November 15, 2023 - Alexandria City Council approves collective bargaining agreement with trade workers. (19)
November 2023 - January 2024 - ACPS School Board meets with outside legal council to discuss collective bargaining (20)
January 25, 2024 - ACPS Collective Bargaining Committee holds a public meeting to discuss a collective bargaining resolution draft (21)
1. If you would like to get a more detailed explanation of what happened at the January 25th meeting read our "UPDATE: January 25th Meeting Summaries" post.

As of the publishing of this article Alexandria City Council has approved 3 collective bargaining contracts. ACPS has yet to decide if its employees will get collective bargaining or not.

Next Steps

The ACPS School Board released a timeline* during their January 25th collective bargaining committee detailing the next steps in the process to pass the collective bargaining resolution (22):

February 8 - ACPS Collective Bargaining committee will introduce a resolution to formally respond to the question of "Should ACPS employees have collective bargaining?"
February 22 - Draft of collective bargaining resolution presented to the School Board for informational purposes.
February 29 - ACPS School Board will host a public hearing on collective bargaining.
March 14 - ACPS will host a work session on collective bargaining.
March 21 - Collective Bargaining resolution presented to the School Board for action.

*This timeline is subject to change.

The collective bargaining resolution will detail things like who is eligible for collective bargaining and what topics are subject to negotiations. If you would like a more detailed explanation on what is currently in the collective bargaining resolution draft please read our "Collective Bargaining Drafts Comparison" article.

However, once the collective bargaining resolution is approved then another series of steps need to occur before we ultimately have a collective bargaining agreement. These basic steps include:

Step 1: ACPS collective bargaining groups can request to be on a representation ballot.
Step 2: ACPS employees vote on who will be their representative during collective bargaining negotiations.
Step 3: ACPS employees and management enter into negotiations
Step 4: ACPS employees and management approve collective bargaining agreement.

Please keep in mind this is a simplified series of steps. We will come out with the more detailed processes for each step as they come.

Conclusion

While it is a great thing that we are finally starting on the process of collective bargaining, it is unfortunate that it took this much time to do it. While it is easy to place the blame for doing so on the ACPS School Board; and they do deserve to be asked why it has taken so long. Especially when City Council has been able to get three collective bargaining agreements ratified while ACPS is still on the first few steps.

But I also wonder why it took the EAA ~2 years to submit an affidavit forcing the School Board to answer the question. Furthermore, I am a union member and I have not heard much from leadership about this process. I wonder if EAA leadership has a plan to inform general membership of what is going on. Either way, it is clear that a large reason why we are in this position is because our leaders, on both sides, have not made collective bargaining priority until now. I hope we will keep this momentum going.

-Alex's Pen